Parliament on the Centre-Right, Government on the Left: Explaining Basque Exceptionalism
The Autonomous Elections of 2009 entailed a large change in Basque politics, given that the PNV, the party that had been governing the Basque institutions continuously since 1980, was removed from power by the PSE–EE. However, the Basques did not vote very differently compared to other elections, the majority voting for nationalist parties, as it has been doing since 1980, and for centre-right parties, as it had done at the beginning of the autonomy and as of 2001. In this article, we aim to explain how, despite this clear tendency towards nationalism and the centre-right, a leftist and non-nationalist party is currently governing in the Basque Country.
Ghost seats in parliaments
In several European Countries citizens’ movements have formed parties whose programme is to reform electoral legislation so that blank votes are transformed into vacant seats in parliament. The first objective of this paper is to offer some tools in order to quantify the potential effect of a reform that would allow citizens to cast a dissatisfaction vote. We show that such a reform would reduce the ease to pass a proposal and modify the distribution of power among parties. The second objective of this paper is to show that this reform could have an impact in parliaments. This is illustrated by the case of the Basque Parliament from 1980 to 2016. At the theoretical level this paper provides some relations between measures of success.
Women's choice in the gender and ethnicity of her obstetrician and gynaecologist
Objective: To ascertain women's preferences in the gender and ethnicity of her obstetrician or gynaecologist and to determine whether there were differences in preferences among different ethnic and age groups.