Abstract
The Spanish political scenario has substantially changed since the beginning of the Great Recession. The emergence of new formations and the high levels of renewal among traditional parties (the PP and PSOE) have provided a ‘structure of opportunities’ that favours entry into politics. However, widespread discontent with political representatives may also have negatively affected many people’s motivations to go into politics. This chapter focuses on a fundamental question: in this context of political turmoil and regeneration, coupled with widespread political disaffection, why do people decide to become politicians? Using the CIUPARCRI data, MPs’ motivations are studied by analysing the differences between sex, age, parties, chambers, socialisation, and recruitment.
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Notes
- 1.
PSOE (120 seats), PP (89), Vox (52), Unidas Podemos (35), Ciudadanos (10) and Más País (2). Vox and Más País do not appear in the study, because when the field work was carried out in 2018, they had not yet entered parliament.
- 2.
Portillo-Pérez and Domínguez (2020) measure fragmentation using the Effective Number of Parliamentary Parties (ENPP), and polarisation using the Polarisation Index (PI). By 2020, the ENPP was 4.6, only lower than the previous term (4.8), whereas the PI was the highest in the last democratic period (of 6 vs 3.1 in 2008), making the 14th term the most ideologically polarised to date.
- 3.
Data come from the project CIUPARCRI, which is the acronym for the project “Ciudadanía y parlamentarios en tiempos de crisis y renovación democrática: el caso comparado de España en el contexto del sur de Europa” (CSO2016-78016-R). The authors of this chapter thank the editors of the book for the invitation to analyse the data and their comments made to improve this chapter.
- 4.
López-Nieto interviews Congress and Senate ex-deputies.
- 5.
It should be noted that in the 2002 questionnaire (López-Nieto 2004), former MPs were asked by means of an open question for the two main reasons that they dedicated themselves to politics. In the 2011–2013 questionnaire (Galais 2018), motivations were asked for in a series of items, which excluded the option of social change, although the question leaves an open answer option.
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Portillo-Pérez, M., Del Río, A. (2021). New Political Scenario, New Motivations?. In: Coller, X., Sánchez-Ferrer, L. (eds) Politicians in Hard Times. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70242-7_5
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