Regional Cleavage Influence towards Island Electoral Behavior: evidences from the Canaries

The Canary Islands are a region with legislative capacities within the European Union (EU). It has had always serious socio-economic deficits. Its distance to its political and geographical centers, its fragmentation and the weakness of its geographical neighbours highly remarked its Centre-Periphery cleavage towards both, Madrid and Brussels. Regarding to the regional/national cleavage (at political level mainly represented by the non-State wide parties), the Canary political framework has been large and varied. Therefore, Canary politics presents so often insular parties, local ones, several large electoral coalitions and independent candidatures. Among this political parties diversity, the Coalición Canaria (CC) birth (1993) and immediate electoral success and regional government performance (until nowadays), represents the main issue of the contemporary Canary nationalism (Tuñón, 2008b). The specific Archipelago electoral regulations and the lack of regional political arch fragmentation (only the left and the right-wing national parties, PSOE and PP, get significant records within the Archipelago) promoted the CC regional government leading majorities’ continuity during the last fifteen years. However, the regional coalition electoral decline has been progressive since it got its top ballot boxes records in 1999 and 2000. How does then the regional/national cleavage influence the Islands voters? Has its importance decreased over the years? Does the centre-periphery issue variable influence equally Canary voter’s choices within Local, Regional, National and European elections? How would it then be possible to measure the Regional cleavage influence towards electoral behaviour in the Canary Islands? The proposed exploratory research will be carried out through findings, mainly due to the available Islands electoral records and its qualitative analysis method interpretation. Thus, the text will seek to analytically answer every above single proposed question about how the Ultra-Peripheral (Regional) cleavage influences both, the political parties’ framework and the electoral behaviour in the Canary Islands