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Campbell and Miller's seminal paper in 1957 founds a tradition in political science that deals with split-ticket voting. The increasing implementation of mixed-member electoral systems during the nineties offers the opportunity of testing the validity of the theories that traditionally have explained split-ticket voting in a different institutional context. This research focuses on 1999 and 2002 New Zealand general elections and takes as its main independent variables the prospective and retrospective mechanisms of voting. In sum, the paper concludes that in countries with this kind of institutional arrangements bad feelings about the candidates (either in the constituency or in the party list), and bad judgements about the performance of national or local incumbents of the parties with which the voter is indentified increase the probability of casting a split-ticket vote. Adapted from the source document.

En los últimos años, el número de referenda convocados ha aumentado considerablemente. A pesar de ello, el estudio de la democracia directa no se ha desarrollado a la misma velocidad. En este trabajo, se describen las razones que empujan a un político a convocar un referéndum, y se analiza la celebración en España del referéndum sobre la Constitución europea en 2005, constatando la insuficiencia de las teorías hasta ahora desarrolladas para explicarla; de ahí la necesidad de sugerir otros argumentos. En este sentido, el trabajo concluye que el presidente español Rodríguez Zapatero trató con el más que previsible y abultado sí español de incentivar el voto afirmativo en otros países donde el resultado del referéndum era más incierto.

This paper studies changes in voting preferences over election campaigns. Building on the literature on spatial models and valence issues, we study whether (1) ideological distance to political parties, (2) assessments of party competence to handle different policy issues, and (3) voter-updated candidate evaluations are factors that explain shifts in voter choices in the weeks preceding the election. To test our hypotheses, we use data from three survey panels conducted for the 2008, 2011 and 2015 Spanish general elections. Our findings show that valence factors are more influential than ideological indifference to account for campaign conversion. ; We thank the journal's editors and reviewers for helpful comments. We are grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for financial support through grant CSO2013-40870-R.

This paper analyses which districts are targeted by Spanish political parties in their electoral campaigns. We find that the major Spanish parties - PP and PSOE - mobilise districts where they are more likely to win a new seat or are in danger of losing one they already hold. The predicted closeness of the district race is more relevant in the smallest districts. We also find that Spanish parties mobilise their strongholds. We suggest that, apart from the pure office-seeking strategies, political finance motivations might also play a role in the mobilisation choices made by Spanish party elites. ; We would like to acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its financial support through the project 'Comportamiento electoral y políticas públicas' [Reference: CSO2013-40870-R].

Desde la instauración de los primeros ayuntamientos democráticos en 1979, se han celebrado diez elecciones municipales en España. En los escasos estudios dedicados a ellas, el voto ha sido habitualmente explicado recurriendo a variables de ámbito nacional según el conocido modelo de las elecciones de segundo orden. En este trabajo examinaremos la validez de estos patrones de comportamiento cuando introducimos también factores explicativos de carácter local. Para comprobarlo, hemos estimado distintos modelos multinivel utilizando una ambiciosa base de datos que contiene variables individuales y contextuales para una muestra representativa de municipios españoles entre 1991 y 2011. Los resultados son sumamente interesantes: factores individuales como la ideología de los votantes e indicadores contextuales como la tasa de desempleo a nivel municipal inciden de manera significativa en la probabilidad de votar al partido del alcalde. ; Since the establishment of the first democratic local councils in 1979, ten municipal elections have taken place in Spain. In the few studies devoted to them, voting has habitually been explained by using national variables and following the wellknown model of second-order elections. In this paper we examine the validity of these conclusions by also considering local factors. We have estimated several hierarchical models using an ambitious datasetwhich includes both individual and contextual variables for a representative sample of Spanish municipalities between 1991 and 2011. Our empirical results are particularly interesting, with individual factors such as voters' ideology and contextual indicators such as the unemployment rate at the municipal level having a significant impact on the probability of voting for the incumbent mayor's party.