The role of contextual factors in the electoral resurgence of extreme right-wing forces in Spain: The case of Andalusia

Abstract

Up until the end of 2018, extreme right-wing parties and their anti-immigration discourse, now a common occurrence in other European countries, had not appeared on the Spanish political scene. However, in December of that year, the Spanish extreme right-wing party VOX reversed this trend and made significant electoral gains in the Andalusian regional elections. This phenomenon has led us to analyse, in this study, the role played by contextual factors (i.e., out-group size, territorial concentration of the immigrant population, demographic change in settlement locations, aggregated educational level and unemployment rate among the receiving society) in the rise in the number of VOX voters. To achieve this, VOX's results from all the polling stations in Andalusia contained in its 5946 census tracts were analysed. At the same time, each census tract was associated with its demographic, economic and educational data, and their relationship was analysed using a multilevel analysis with Mplus. The results show that the presence of economic immigrants is indeed associated with a higher percentage of VOX voters in Andalusia. However, despite this general trend, those census tracts with a high territorial concentration of Maghrebi immigrants are associated with a lower percentage of support for this extreme right-wing party. The opposite is found for Romanian immigrants. Moreover, areas with larger percentages of people with a high level of education influenced greater support for VOX. Thus our findings suggest the traditional explanations for the increased support for extreme right-wing parties in northern Europe do not provide clear patterns that can be extrapolated to Andalusia.