La influencia de la atmósfera política local sobre la conducta electoral: Un estudio del voto socialista en las elecciones locales andaluzas de 2011

Abstract

This paper incorporates the contextual perspective in the analysis of electoral behavior. Whilst focusing on the partisan orientation of the vote, this paper takes up one of the classic questions of contextual electoral literature: the influence of the community's political environment on voting behavior of its inhabitants. We examine the influence of the political composition of Andalusian municipalities on the socialist vote in the 2011 local election. Our analysis shows that the local political atmosphere had a minimal but significant effect on the voting of its residents in the local elections. Accordingly, the political environment in Andalusian localities, pushed voters, whose immediate surroundings did not provide politically relevant information or were independent, to follow the local socialist majority. Urbanization weakens this local effect on the socialist vote. The other main finding of our research is the importance of informal social interaction in explaining the socialist vote, through conversations taking place in the environment immediate to the individual.