The emergence of right-wing radicalism at the local level in Spain : the Catalan case

In spite of being considered an example of failure of the radical right, Spain has seen for the first time since the restoration of democracy how some extreme parties got representation in the last 2003 and 2007 local elections. This article focuses on the most successful among these parties, namely the Plataforma per Catalunya. We suggest that partisan conversion of socialist voters and mobilization of former abstainers are the main origin of radical votes. By contrast, new cohorts of voters and swings from right-wing voters or nationalist voters do not have an influence. The results are triangulated with two methods of ecological inference that allow us to estimate the proportion of individuals who changed their vote in one direction or the other across two consecutive elections