New Parties' Supporters in Post-Crisis Europe

It is common ground in the literature that the current recession has triggered a series of political effects, among them, a increase on destabilisation of Western European party systems (Hernández & Kriesi, 2016), and “the rise of new political actors and novel alignments on both new and old political issues” (Zamora-Kapoor & Coller, 2014: 1511). This research sheds light on recent changes in voting behaviour in Spanish politics, in particular, voting for new parties in the 2015 legislative elections in Spain. Our aim is to evaluate to what extent voting for new parties is motivated by programmatic orientations or rather, it responds to a rejection to politics and the political establishment (protest vote). Our analysis shows a quite clear pattern: economic evaluations and experiences are not the key variables accounting for voting for new parties, but disappointment with traditional politics. We also conduct some tests in order to find differences between these newcomers’ voters, since not everybody switched from old parties to a single new option. To pursue these goals a new database on political attitudes and vote preferences is used, which was launched in December 2015 by a University of Salamanca research team.