During the electoral campaign, one of the most common tools used by political parties to reach voters is sending propaganda to homes. In fifteen days, the mailboxes are filled with envelopes with the distinctive of each formation, which include brochures with information on the candidate or his team or the electoral program, as well as the ballot paper. Even so, there are 895,257 citizens throughout Spain who these days will not receive such publicity, because they have requested it. The figure has multiplied by ten since the municipal and regional elections of 2019, which was the first year in which citizens were offered this option, as a result of the Data Protection Law.
According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), in the last local contest there were 87,556 voters who had previously rejected the advertising at their homes. Although the number has increased substantially in a short time, and is close to 900,000, it continues to represent a very small part of the census for the next municipal ones (currently, 2.53%).
To avoid receiving this publicity, they have had to fill out a form on the INE website with which they request to be excluded from the copy of the electoral census that is delivered to the parties for postal delivery. Said petitions had to be completed before April 17 to be applied in the May 28 elections.
Where the greatest growth in absolute numbers between 2019 and 2023 is perceived is in the Community of Madrid, which has gone from 17,111 excluded from this list to 171,796. In the province of Barcelona, ​​an increase twelve times higher than the value of the 2019 elections is also reflected: in four years, 92,000 more people have made the request to unsubscribe and the current figure is very little short of 100,000.
This upward trend is widespread throughout the Spanish territory. In many provinces where in the last municipal ones there were hundreds of people who did not receive publicity, now there are thousands. In percentage terms, the three territories that grew the most were the provinces of the Basque Country: Ãlava, Vizcaya and Gipuzkoa. Precisely, Ãlava is, with the census in hand, where there is a higher percentage of excluded (5.06%) in all of Spain. They are followed by the Aragonese provinces of Teruel and Zaragoza, at some distance, at the forefront of this ranking. On the other hand, the provinces in which this group has a lower weight in the census are Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Toledo, Melilla, Badajoz and Cuenca.
How is this boom in petitions explained? For the political scientist Toni Aira, there may be several reasons. One of them is the awareness of privacy, which is growing among citizens. On the other hand, Aira explains, there may be voters who are dissatisfied with an “intrusive” way of delivering information and prefer to choose what they consume and what not. “There is already a bombardment by land, sea and air and they don’t want it to reach their homesâ€, adds the professor of Political Communication at UPF-BSM.
Aira also identifies a “growing disaffection” for the successive economic crises, for which there are those who link “their difficult situation with politics and do not believe that this will give them an answer.” They understand, therefore, that the sending of electoral propaganda obeys a partisan strategy “and not to explain” how they can solve their problems and concerns.
A phenomenon that influences this issue is the “hypersimplification of the message” in recent years, something that has an impact on the content of the envelope that reaches the mailbox. The political scientist indicates that “before there could be expectations of receiving proposals”, but nowadays people are already aware that the discourse is “simpler”. Likewise, he points out an “oversaturation” of politics and everything that surrounds him in the voters, which can be seen when rejecting such publicity.
This oversaturation has also been identified by the parties. And although they persist in sending propaganda to reinforce their “brand presence” and that “there is no support left” to be used, a trend is seen in which political communication “focuses” its audiences much more.
In parallel to political reasons, this increase in voters excluded from receiving information for reasons of a social nature can also be understood. On the one hand, to reduce the cost of paper. On the other, due to the new paradigm of relations between citizens and institutions, which tends more and more to the digital.
The same thing happens in large companies, where some send invoices and documentation to their clients electronically and others give the option to choose. In the latter case, a similar trend is perceived in which citizens increasingly opt for an exclusively digital relationship. For example, 47% of Endesa’s customers currently have a digital invoice, after having explicitly requested it. It is an exponential growth produced in recent years and from the company they anticipate that it will go further.