The effect of the Spanish Law of Political Parties (LPP) on the attitude of the Basque Country population towards ETA: A dynamic modelling approach

Abstract

In June 2002, the Spanish Government passed the “Law of Political Parties” (LPP) with the aim, among others, of preventing parties giving political support to terrorist organizations. This law affected the Basque nationalist party “Batasuna”, due to its proved relation with ETA. In this paper, taking data from the Euskobarometro (Basque Country survey) related to the attitude of the Basque population towards ETA, we propose a dynamic model for the pre-LPP scenario. This model will be extrapolated to the future in order to predict what would have happened to the attitude of the Basque population if the law had not been passed. These model predictions will be compared to post-LPP data from the Euskobarometro using a bootstrapping approach in order to quantify the effect of the LPP on the attitude of Basque Country population towards ETA.