From Political Mobilization to Electoral Participation: Turnout in Barcelona in the 1930s (original) (raw)

Full democratization and the extension of the franchise to low-income, illiterate populations was historically followed by a drop in turnout, pointing to the difficulty of making voting rights truly effective. Political parties had to develop powerful electoral machines and tap into existing social networks to bring citizens to the polls. In this paper we explore that process in the context of 1930s Barcelona, taking advantage of a unique panel data set of official registers that include individualized information on turnout as well as other personal characteristics (such as age, gender, address, literacy and occupation) of almost 25,000 electors for two elections in Spain's Second Republic (1934 and 1936), and matching individual voting roll-calls with relevant precinct-level socioeconomic , political and geographical data. We show that voting (particularly among unskilled, left-leaning voters) was driven by the direct mobilizational strategies developed by political parties and those social organizations (such as trade unions) that encompassed an important part of society and often acted in tandem with party machines-to that effect we exploit the short-term change in anarchist trade union's electoral strategies. We also show that voters were mobilized indirectly-through the social networks in which they were embedded. Partisan and organizational resources and strategies were especially important for previously abstentionist unskilled workers and in heavily working-class neighborhoods.