New Political Parties, old cleavages: an ecological approach to Basque Country´s new Party System

Abstract

The present paper contains a circumstantial study regarding the sociological and political electoral bases which define the new emerging Spanish political parties. Both of them try to get some representatives during the last regional elections held in the Basque Country on 2016. In this sense, we observe the cleavage issue in its classical meaning in order to identify the possible structural elements on the electoral competition in this territory. The analytical approach taken for this study will use bivariate geostatistical techniques and aggregate datasets referred to the different municipalities conforming this region. The results shown that both political formations hold their support in areas where certain kind of electors concentrate alongside the classical cleavages defining the electoral competence in the Basque Country.