Desafección política ¿estructura o coyuntura?un estudio profundo en el contexto actual de crisis

Abstract

The research focuses on political disaffection understood as a negative feeling towards politicians, politics and its processes, and towards a system incapable to face the demands and citizens needs. In the current Spanish political context this is a fact that, in addition, has grown significantly during the period of crisis; what contradicts the culturalist theses defended by a large majority of researchers dedicated to the study of disaffection. The components of this attitude - political disengagement and institutional disaffection - also present contrasting tendencies. Until now, both components showed a parallel behavior, increasing or decreasing at the same time. Now, however, they show a disruption; which leads us to raise new research questions in the context of this new context. Thus, this thesis aims, in general terms, to know the factors that explain the political disaffection in Spain, comparing their new tendencies and justifications with the rest of the surrounding countries, in order to decode if we are dealing with an attitude with particular features in the Spanish case. The objective is, therefore, to resolve if disaffection is a consequence of structural or conjunctural factors, or otherwise, the modifications in this attitude respond to a higher stage whose response may lie in a cultural change in the political attitudes of the Spanish. For this purpose, a validated political disaffection index is created through confirmatory factor analysis and the validity of our central hypothesis that disaffection is a changing attitude that is fundamentally influenced by the political, economic and social conjunctures. Methodologically, the thesis carries out an APC analysis (age, period and cohort) that allows to consider at the same time the different effects related to our dependent variable, namely, those related to both structural and conjunctural elements, using the data set of the ESS and different barometers of the CIS, creating a time series with the different surveys that allow us to longitudinally analyse the political disaffection of Spain and the countries of its environment. Likewise, multiple regression and discriminant analysis are used to know at an individual level the factors that to a greater extent determine the nature and characteristics of political disaffection in Spain. We thus situate ourselves in the attempt to make a scientific contribution that analyses all the essential variables and proposes at the time a medium-level theory -combine theory and empirical research- on the nature and the possible effects that derive from the presence of disaffection. The results, finally, point towards a greater weight of the conjunctural factors in the determination of political disaffection in Spain, as well as in a large part of the surrounding countries, reflecting the changing nature of this attitude, and highlighting the weakness in the explanation of change by culturalism.