Suchergebnisse

It is well known that the President of the United States is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the population. Every time a candidate who does not win the most popular votes is elected President, detractors of the Electoral College call for its abolishment and supporters extol its undoubtedly merits. This article investigates what would have happened if a solution halfway between both extremes (a direct national election and the current system) had been used in historical Presidential elections; namely, a proportional rule with thresholds to assign electors in each state. This system would generate electoral colleges closer to popular will, reduce the risk of electing a minority president and impose the need of more balanced regional support to be elected, although increasing the risk of a third candidate emerging.

Facing a prospective majority of socialists during the early third of the 20th century, some secular conservative and liberal parties pooled their votes to raise the majority threshold for the left, while others raised it by enacting some form of proportional representation. We use vote transfers, estimated by a new method of ecological inference, to explain those far-reaching choices. We provide a new conceptualization and measurement of the segmentation of the electoral market to test a proposition within the Boix-Rokkan framework: proportional representation reform was chosen when vote transfers foretold coalition failure. To substantiate our claim, we investigate two most similar cases, Denmark during 1910–1918 and New Zealand during 1928–1931, that diverged in the explanatory variable and in the response.

Surveys applying quota sampling in their final step are widely used in opinion and market research all over the world. This is also the case in Spain, where the surveys carried out by CIS (a public institution for sociological research supported by the government) have become a point of reference. The rules used by CIS to select individuals within quotas, however, could be improved as they lead to biases in age distributions. Analysing more than 545,000 responses collected in the 220 monthly barometers conducted between 1997 and 2016 by CIS, we compare the empirical distributions of the barometers with the expected distributions from the sample design and/or target populations. Among other results, we find, as a consequence of the rules used, significant overrepresentations in the observed proportions of respondents with ages equal to the minimum and maximum of each quota (age and gender group). Furthermore, in line with previous literature, we also note a significant overrepresentation of ages ending in zero. After offering simple solutions to avoid all these biases, we discuss some of their consequences for modelling and inference and about limitations and potentialities of CIS data.

This note illustrates some of the new roles that armed forces are taking on in developed countries, highlighting the structure, capabilities, and missions developed by the Spanish Military Emergency Unit (UME). The note describes some of these new roles assumed by UME, such as its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and shows, using official temporal and georeferenced data, the growing use of the military to support civilian authorities in response to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and other emergencies alike. In addition, we also analyze public opinion survey data to argue that this is helping to improve society's perception of the armed forces even in a country like Spain where, due to its recent history, a significant part of its population is reluctant to the military. In short, the military is taking on more emergency roles as needs arise and these new roles can help to improve its perception by citizens.

This paper introduces the SEA database (acronym for Spanish Electoral Archive). SEA brings together the most complete public repository available to date on Spanish election outcomes. SEA holds all the results recorded from the electoral processes of General (1979–2019), Regional (1989–2021), Local (1979–2019) and European Parliamentary (1987–2019) elections held in Spain since the restoration of democracy in the late 70 s, in addition to other data sets with electoral content. The data are offered for free and is presented in a homogeneous and friendly format. Most of the databases are available for download with data from various electoral levels, including from the ballot box level. This paper details how the information is organized, what the main variables are on offer for each election, which processes were applied to the data for their homogenization, and discusses future areas of work. This data has many applications, for example, as inputs in election prediction models and in ecological inference algorithms, to study determinants of turnout or voting, or for defining marketing strategies.

AbstractIncome inequality is becoming a growing concern, worldwide, with wage inequality being the root cause of its recent escalation. With the aim of adding to the knowledge on this subject, this paper focuses on the spatial dimension of the problem, an aspect which has received less attention in the literature. We identify the determinants of inequality in wage distribution in Spain at a provincial level using the microdata of the Structure of Earnings Survey (N = 216,769) and estimate their impact from a spatial perspective. Spatial computation of wage concentrations, however, reduces the sample size to just 52 observations, leading to model challenges. To overcome this problem, we adopt a super‐population approach and, by exploiting the rich dataset available, increase the instances of the model variables by replicating the actual sampling design employed to collect the data. We apply a re‐sampling method that gives us the opportunity to test the impact of spatial dependence and recover provincial fixed effects. Our best model is a spatial‐lag of X fixed‐effect SLX model. We analyse the impact of workers' personal and employment characteristics, their workplace and their membership of a province on the concentration of wages. Our study finds that a more equitable distribution of wages could be brought about by reducing the impact of workers' training and level of responsibility on their wages and by the promotion of small and medium‐sized enterprises. These results highlight the importance of the labour and salary structure in the equitable development of societies.

La desigualdad de género, y en particular la desigualdad salarial de género, ha sido considerada una prioridad política en muchos países durante las últimas décadas, con foco puesto en reducir la llamada brecha salarial, es decir, en buscar una convergencia en media para los salarios de hombres y mujeres. Una aproximación de medias, sin embargo, no implica distribuciones salariales más justas (totales y de género). Utilizando los microdatos de una muestra nacionalmente representativa de la población ocupada de España (N = 216,769), descomponemos la desigualdad salarial total en desigualdad salarial femenina y masculina (intra-grupos) y desigualdad de género (entre-grupos) y exploramos hasta qué punto estos índices dependen de las características laborales previamente identificadas como determinantes de las diferencias promedio entre hombres y mujeres ("brecha salarial de género"). Para este conjunto de datos, los análisis muestran que la desigualdad salarial de género es más alta que la desigualdad salarial total y ambas la desigualdad salarial total y la desigualdad de género aumentan con la edad y el nivel educativo de los trabajadores.

Countless examples of misleading forecasts on behalf of both pre-election and exit polls can be found all over the world. Non-representative samples due to differential nonresponse have been claimed as being the main reason for inaccurate exit-poll projections. In real inference problems, it is seldom possible to compare estimates and true values. Electoral forecasts are an exception. Comparisons between estimates and final outcomes can be carried out once votes have been tallied. In this paper, we examine the raw data collected in seven exit polls conducted in Spain and test the likelihood that the data collected in each sampled voting location can be considered as a random sample of actual results. Knowing the answer to this is relevant for both electoral analysts and forecasters as, if the hypothesis is rejected, the shortcomings of the collected data would need amending. Analysts could improve the quality of their computations by implementing local correction strategies. We find strong evidence of nonsampling error in Spanish exit polls and evidence that the political context matters. Nonresponse bias is larger in polarized elections and in a climate of fear ; Existe un gran número de ejemplos de predicciones inexactas obtenidas a partir tanto de encuestas pre-electorales como de encuestas a pie de urna a lo largo del mundo. La presencia de tasas de no-respuesta diferencial entre distintos tipos de electores ha sido la principal razón esgrimida para justificar las proyecciones erróneas en las encuestas a pie de urna. En problemas de inferencia rara vez es posible comparar estimaciones y valores reales. Las predicciones electorales son una excepción. La comparación entre estimaciones y resultados finales puede realizarse una vez los votos han sido contabilizados. En este trabajo, examinamos los datos brutos recogidos en siete encuestas a pie de urna realizadas en España y testamos la hipótesis de que los datos recolectados en cada punto de muestreo puedan ser considerados una muestra aleatoria de los resultados realmente registrados en el correspondiente colegio electoral. Conocer la respuesta a esta pregunta es relevante para analistas y encuestadores electorales, ya que, si se rechaza la hipótesis, las deficiencias de los datos recogidos deberían ser subsanadas en concordancia. Los analistas podrían mejorar la calidad de sus estimaciones mediante la implementación de estrategias de corrección local. En nuestro estudio encontramos una fuerte evidencia de errores ajenos al muestreo en las encuestas a pie de urna en España y constatamos la importancia del contexto político. El sesgo de no-respuesta es mayor en elecciones polarizadas y en un clima de violencia o presión.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the gender dimension of its more visible socio-economic impacts has been the topic of study by several researchers. The current paper takes this further by focusing on the invisible chores done in the families at home. This paper studies how people's behavior towards housework changed during and after the confinement period in Spain. We analyze whether people did more housework during the lockdown period than before it, the way this housework was distributed between women and men, and whether this has changed since the end of lockdown. The empirical analyses point to a new trend in the housework gender gap: differences between men and women have narrowed since the lockdown, although women continue to bear most of the responsibility.