Álvaro Sánchez-García

Existing research indicates that the electoral effects of changing house rents depend on political parties’ left-right positioning and adherence to populist ideas. This paper explores the association between house rent increases and voting in Madrid by exploiting the availability of fine-grained data at the census tract-level, and the existence of an electoral arena where parties compete from different positions on crucial dimensions such as populism and the intervention of the state in the economy. In particular, we focus our analysis on non-populist parties of the main stream left (PSOE) and right (Ciudadanos and PP), a radical right party with a strong neoliberal discourse and inconsistent populist appeals (VOX), and a radical left party that has traditionally adopted a populist discourse (Unidas Podemos). Our main results indicate that house rent increases benefit right-wing parties in neighbour hoods with high ownership rates (economic gain), thus offering an alternative context-dependent mechanism to explain the success of (liberal) radical right parties when house rents rise. They also suggest that house rent in creases associate with voting for left-wing parties, especially if they adhere to populist ideas, in neighbourhoods with lower levels of homeownership (economic burden).

In recent years, Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) have gained significant ground in many Western democracies. While most studies focus on rural areas, this paper examines the role of population growth in explaining support for Vox, Spain’s leading PRRP, in urban areas. Spain o)ers a unique case due to its rapid urbanisation and the substantial presence of Vox in metropolitan settings. Using data from over 27,000 urban census tracts, we find that population growth is positively associated with Vox support, particularly in suburban areas. This e)ect is moderated by socio-economic conditions: it is stronger in neighbourhoods with lower incomes and higher unemployment. Our findings suggest that population growth intensifies support for Vox in left-behind urban areas, underlining the interaction between demographic change and socio-economic disadvantage. These results expand the current understanding of PRRP support by showing that both rural depopulation and urban growth contribute to their success. However, the study’s limitations call for further research across di)erent contexts and with more fine-grained indicators of left-behindness.

In many European countries, people increasingly leave rural or small municipalities to live and work in urban or metropolitan environments. Although previous work on the ?left behind? places has examined the relationship between the rural?urban divide and vote choice, less is known about how depopulation affects electoral behaviour. Is there a relationship between experiencing a loss in population and support for the different parties? We investigate this question by examining the Spanish case, a country where the topic of depopulation has become a salient issue in political competition. Using a newly compiled dataset, we also explore whether the relationship between depopulation and electoral returns is moderated by municipality size, local compositional changes, the loss of public services and changes in amenities. Our findings show that depopulated municipalities give higher support to the main Conservative party, mainly in small municipalities. Yet, municipalities on the brink of disappearance are more likely to give larger support to the far-right. Results overall show that the effect of depopulation seems to be driven by compositional changes, and not as a result of losing public services or a deterioration of the vibrancy of the town. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between internal migration and electoral behaviour.