Territorial Conflict in Spain: Preferences and Institutions, 2021

Amat, Francesc and Balcells, Laia (2024). Territorial Conflict in Spain: Preferences and Institutions, 2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857258

The project is organised around three thematic areas: (i) how trust within and between social groups and towards governance institutions emerges and evolves in contexts of rising inequality; (ii) how trust in unequal societies shapes governance outcomes through two intervening factors - political behaviour and social mobilisation; and (iii) the pathways through which changes in such intervening factors may sometimes result in inclusive governance outcomes, but in the breakdown of governance at other times. Each of these areas will incorporate detailed theoretical and empirical analyses at the subnational level in four countries - Colombia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Spain - affected by rising inequalities and characterised by unstable or strained democratic institutions.

The absence of systematic qualitative, quantitative and behavioural data has hindered progress in understanding the links between inequality, trust and governance in countries outside North America and Western Europe. The project seeks to compile a number of unexplored data sources and collect new data comparatively across these other countries in order to fulfil this critical gap. This data collection will involve: (i) comparative individual-level surveys to understand contemporaneous levels of trust, and attitudes towards formal and non-formal local governing institutions, (ii) behavioural experiments under different inequality and political contexts to better understand the formation of trust under different scenarios, (iii) indepth interviews with key political actors in government, members of social movements and citizen organisations to understand how inequalities affect perceptions of governance and strategies of political mobilisation, and (iv) detailed compilation of archival data that will allow us to better understand how inequalities and attitudes have evolved across time and how different historical junctures may shape the governance outcomes we observe today.

Data description (abstract)

Territorial politics has remained an essential point of contention in Spain, with the accommodation of geographically concentrated minorities being one of the most unresolved challenges in this multinational state. The recent conflict in Catalonia, and the constitutional and democratic crisis resulting from it, illustrate the deficiencies of the institutional system that regulates the territorial distribution of power in Spain. Indeed, several issues, such as the recognition of national minorities or the fiscal treatment of regions, remain unresolved forty-five years after the inception of the Spanish autonomic system. To assess attitudes towards territorial issues among Spaniards, we conducted an online survey in Spain in June 2021 (drawing on a representative sample of the voting-age population) where we embedded a conjoint experiment.

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