Do child murderers deserve the death penalty? Should the monarchy be abolished? Is there a lack of Catholic education in schools? Are you in favor of a basic income of 1,200 euros per month? And that the passage to migrant boats is blocked? Do you support an agreed referendum on independence in Catalonia?
It is likely that you have answered most of these questions without hesitation. They encapsulate some of the great ideological fractures that Spanish society is going through. Hand in hand with Cluster17, a French survey company that has also worked in France, Italy or Belgium, La Vanguardia proposes a different way of looking at and thinking about politics, and also of predicting what can happen on July 23rd.
As of today, the readers of this newspaper can find a test on our website to discover which political tribe they belong to. It looks like a game but behind it there is science. The Cluster17 method is based on clustering, the political-ideological segmentation of society. Based on a 30-question test on the most divisive issues in Spain, to which they have submitted 5,534 respondents, they have identified, through the use of a statistical algorithm, 16 clusters, which correspond to the 16 Spanish political families or tribes. Its members share a system of opinions, values, a way of seeing the world.
You can read the description of each group, organized ideologically from left to right, here. The accompanying illustrations, created by the demographics laboratory, seek to reflect the dominant demographic characteristics of each group.
The positions of individuals on key issues, such as religion, LGTBI rights, immigration, the territorial debate or social assistance, are the most decisive factor in their political preferences and electoral behavior, says the founder of Cluster17, Jean- Yves Dormagen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Montpellier and expert in electoral sociology and abstention. They are a great predictor, because they are postures that tend to remain stable and when they evolve they do so slowly. People don't change their views on immigration or abortion over the course of a campaign.
The Cluster17 team has spent several months designing the test, which is specific to Spain because the ideological divides are not the same here as in France or Italy. The territorial issue, the monarchy or the Catholic Church backbone the identity with the power that immigration or trust with the system do in neighboring countries. The formulation of the questions selected for the test deliberately arouses polarization, so those that provoked answers that were too consensual or lukewarm have been discarded. For each topic, there is also a negative question and a positive one, to capture both support and rejection.
The objective is to analyze “how the electoral demand is structured”, says Dormagen. Beyond what political leaders promise or the issues that dominate the campaign (the offer), his work puts the magnifying glass on the other side: what are the issues that matter most to citizens and that decide their vote, sometimes perhaps without them being aware of it. “The selected measures allow us to read Spanish society, but they are not necessarily programmatic measures. Although they are not issues that are in the political debate, your position on the matter says a lot about who you are, how you think and how you see the world, ”explains the expert. For example, they ask about the death penalty: although no party has established it in the program, they have identified that it is an issue that divides the country. What is intended is to dive into the deepest currents of political identity.
Drawing a map of the political-ideological landscape allows us to understand what the electoral space of each party is, where the votes are disputed with other formations and how the electoral competition evolves. With an eye on the July 23 elections, his method makes it possible to identify, for example, which voters Sánchez risks losing, which ideological groups are most mobilized, in which fishing grounds Vox fishes or which are the issues towards which each party should drag the electoral debate to mobilize their vote.
