Elecciones municipales en España la personalización del voto

Abstract

When voters cast their ballot in local elections, are they only taking into account national factors? Or do they, to the contrary, also pay attention to local elements? In this article we argue that voters' evaluations of candidates for mayor are particularly important to explain party choice in this type of subnational elections in Spain. To empirically verify the existence of this relationship, we focus on the 1999, 2007, and 2011 elections. By dwell-ing on a relatively heterogeneous sample of municipali-ties and working with surveys undertaken by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, we show the effect of candidates' evaluations at the expense of a less pronounced role of ideology. The provided evidence also suggests that this pattern becomes stronger in small municipalities and more recent elections.