Actitudes, uso y propuestas sobre el Sistema sanitario español

Ante las propuestas recientes de reforma y racionalización del sistema público de salud, este artículo realiza una radiografía de la percepción y opiniones que los ciudadanos tienen sobre el sistema sanitario español. En primer lugar, se analiza el uso que los ciudadanos hacen del sistema, en comparación con el de ciudadanos de otros países. Seguidamente, y utilizando datos de encuestas españolas, se analizan cuáles son las fortalezas y debilidades de la provisión pública y privada de salud en España. Estos datos nos permiten realizar unas propuestas finales alrededor de las posibles reformas futura

Party system nationalisation and social spending

Party systems diverge in their levels of nationalisation. While in some countries parties obtain similar levels of electoral support in all districts, in others parties get very asymmetric electoral shares across districts. The distributive consequences of this have been seldom studied. The argument tested here is that when political parties have nationalised electorates they have stronger incentives to provide social policies that spread benefits all over the territory. This argument is tested in 22 OECD democracies for the period 1980-2006. The results show that, regardless of the electoral system in place, there is a positive relation between party system nationalisation and social spending

The Europeanization of national elections. The role of country characteristics in shaping EU issue voting

Research has shown that voting in European elections is affected by domestic politics. However, in the last years, and particularly after the European debt crisis, also the EU has gained relevance and salience in national politics. In this paper we address the Europeanization of national elections and assess to what extent the characteristics of countries condition the intensity of EU issue voting. Using data from the European Election Studies and the Comparative Manifestos Project, our results demonstrate the importance of congruence between citizens’ and parties’ positions on the EU for the individual vote on the national level and show how this varies across countries. We provide evidence that EU issue voting is more intense in countries with more political influence in the EU as well as in countries that are net contributors to EU funds.We also acknowledge the Economic and Social Research Council for its generous support through grant ES/N01734X/1, and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through grant CSO2017-82881-R

Economic globalization and decentralization: A centrifugal or centripetal relationship?

One of the most significant economic trends in the last decades has been the integration of countries in international markets. What have been the consequences of global economic integration upon the territorial organization of the states? Has it contributed to centralize powers or to further decentralization? The literature so far has provided inconclusive evidence. In this article we shed new light on the relationship between economic globalization and territorial politics by using a varied source of data such as the Regional Authority Index, and the KOF indices of globalization for the period 1970-2010. Results show that economic globalization is positively associated to decentralization, particularly in those countries with more regionalist parties and where levels of inequality are lower

Retrospective voting under supranational constraints

Economic voting is commonly seen as a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Recent work argues that globalization attenuates it by blurring responsibility and constraining the room to maneuver of domestic governments. Here we explore the consequences of another factor that also shrinks policy maneuver: Membership of Supranational Institutions. In a pre-registered survey experiment fielded in Spain in May 2018, we manipulate information both about economic performance and about the Eurozone rules that constrain domestic policy-making. Our results show that supranational constraints do not attenuate accountability for bad economic outcomes. Instead, supranational constraints lead to a backlash against both the incumbent and other mainstream parties. We interpret the evidence as suggestive that voters blame these parties for having consented to the supranational rules in the first place and for how their implementation limits domestic responses to bad economic performance. These results show that the room to maneuver argument of the globalization literature cannot be simply extended to membership of supranational organizations.Previous versions of this paper were presented in the University of York, in the 2018, 2021 and 2022 Annual Meetings of the European Political Science Association, the 2022 Meeting of the Council of European Studies, and in the Conference Europe at the Crossroads: European challenges for national politics, held in the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa) in 2018. We thank participants for all their feedback. This project has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council through grant number ES/N01734X/1, the Spanish Ministry of Science through a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship (PI: Ignacio Jurado), and Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (grant PID2020-119460RB-I00

Strategic voting and non-voting in Spanish elections

The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through grant CSO2008-01436

Minority governments and budget deficits: The role of the opposition

When governments are in a parliamentary minority they have to negotiate with opposition parties over the annual budget. We argue that, as a consequence, the preferences of the opposition concerning fiscal outcomes should be reflected in the yearly budget balances. We present a theoretical argument in which the opposition faces a trade-off. It has a short-term interest in deficits since they can signal a weak government, but a long-term aversion to them because, if they reach office, they will have to deal with the burden of increased debt. Empirically, we find that opposition parties affect deficit outcomes depending on their probability of governing in the next term and the weakness of the incumbent government. When the opposition is mainly concentrated in one party, it is likely that it will take over the government and this will make the opposition deficit-averse in the current period. However, if the minority government is a coalition, then a concentrated opposition might see deficits as an opportunity to reach office earlier and might be willing to pass budgets with deficit