Cleavages and thresholds: the political consequences of electoral laws in the Spanish Autonomous Communities, 1980–2000

This paper studies the number of political parties in the Spanish Autonomous Communities in the period 1980–2000 as the outcome of the combination of the permissiveness of the electoral systems and the heterogeneity of the societies. The differences in the number of parties between the Autonomous Communities are more related to the intensity of the regional cleavage than to the permissiveness of the electoral systems. In any case, the addition of these two variables instead of their multiplicative interaction, is the best predictor of the number of competitors in each Community. That is, an Autonomous Community may have a large number of parties either because it maintains an intense cleavage activated by the political elites or because the electoral system is very permissive. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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