Measurement of the electoral crystallization of a social movement: from indignation to vote

What is it about?

This article examines the electoral impact of social protest movements, providing new methodological and conceptual approaches to the subject. Two fields of study, social movements and new political parties, seem to have left a sparsely treated gap between the two: the connection between the rise of social movements and the subsequent emergence of new political parties. Specifically, we are interested in investigating how the foundations of a protest movement electorally behave at the emergence of a new party –one that theoretically reflects the central demands of the movement. We analyze how the support to the 15M movement (also known as the Indignants) has evolved into electoral support to Podemos after its first months of existence. To do this, we compare the social profiles of 15M supporters and Podemos voters through the introduction of an electoral crystallization indication. The results suggest that Podemos vote in the 2014 European elections can be seen as an extension of the protests in the electoral field. This continuity with the protest seems to characterize the appearance of the new party, both in the social base of its first electorate as in regard to its narrative-symbolic aspect. Further, its first electoral base did not respond so much to a ‘protest vote’ –in the sense proposed by Van der Eijk– but rather to a ‘vote of the protest’, gaining electoral support from those more identified with the 15M demands. Finally, comparing the results with other studies, we noted that the political and institutional confidence crisis has an asymmetric effect on the electoral dynamics along the ideological spectrum, a much more intense one than observed on the support to the protest movements. Thus, the ideology is presented as the main regulator of the electoral impact of political dissatisfaction among citizens.

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Why is it important?

With the aim of overcoming the absence of surveys that contain, at the same time, the sympathy towards 15M and the support to Podemos, we propose the calculation of an index of electoral crystallization (IC). This magnitude refers to the transformation of the sympathy of the social movement between public opinion in electoral support to the new political party linked to that movement. Each new political party emerged from the same movement presents a different IC value. At the same time, we can calculate an ICi for each social segment, in function of key variables. This allows us to see between which social sectors there is a greater or lesser translation of vote support, which gives us a perspective that characterizes the formation of the new party. We calculate the electoral crystallization index for each population group (i) in the following way: 〖Index of electoral crystallization〗 _i (〖IC〗 _i) = 〖Remembrance of voting for the political party〗 _i / 〖Sympathy for the social movement〗 _i * 100 where i are the different population groups, segmented by the variable n. In order to measure the explanatory capacity of each of the variables, a second indicator created ad hoc is used for this work: the variation ratio, which indicates, for each independent variable, the deviation between the category (social group) that most converts sympathy for 15M in a vote to Podemos and the least. Reports, thus, the explanatory capacity of said variable. We calculate the variation ratio for each variable n in the following way: 〖Ratio of variation〗 _n = (max⁡ (〖Ic〗 _n)) / (min⁡ (〖Ic〗 _n)) The calculation of the crystallization index (IC) and the variation ratio provide us with information about how the Podemos vote has been consolidated among 15M sympathizers, evidencing the differences between different social groups and identifying the variables with the greatest dispersion.