Abstract
This chapter analyzes the national identity of political representatives from Spain’s “Autonomous” (Regional) Parliaments, the Spanish Congress, and the Spanish Senate. Our analysis pays special attention to the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia, since these are the Autonomous Communities with the strongest nationalist movements, and indeed the main raison d’être of Spain’s quasi-federal “State of the Autonomies.” We find that the representatives for all of Spain resemble their constituencies much more than do representatives for the Basque, Catalan, and Galician Parliaments. In particular, we find quite considerable divergences between the patterns of identification among the members of the Catalan Parliament and those of the voters across most political formations. Both on the whole and in almost all specific parties, the Catalan political class expresses a profile much more nationalistic than that of their constituencies.
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Notes
- 1.
There are other techniques for measuring the positions taken by political parties in their party programs exist, such as the one employed in The Comparative Manifestos Project and The Regional Manifestos Project (www.regionalmanifestosproject.com). These efforts are complementary to ours. In fact, our findings can help shed light on their database—by allowing us to measure levels of conflict and/or consensus within parties over different aspects of party programs.
- 2.
- 3.
For a similar analysis of Andalusia, see Martínez-Herrera and Paradés (2014).
- 4.
The figures that appear in this chapter concern the weighted samples for each of the universes to which the analysis refers (i.e. the set of parliamentarians from Spain, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, as appropriate).
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Herrera, E.M., Miley, T.J. (2018). National Identity and Political Representation: Rival “Top-Down” National Projects. In: Coller, X., Jaime-Castillo, A., Mota, F. (eds) Political Power in Spain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63826-3_11
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