Do child killers deserve the death penalty? Should the monarchy be abolished? Lack of Catholic education in schools? Are you in favor of a basic income of 1,200 euros per month? And to block the passage of migrant boats? Do you support an agreed referendum on the independence of Catalonia?
You probably answered most of these questions without hesitation. They contain some of the great ideological fractures that affect Spanish society. Thanks to Cluster17, a French demographic 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 may happen on July 23.
As of today, readers of this newspaper can find a test on the web to discover which political tribe they belong to. You can access the test through the QR code at the bottom of the page.
It looks like a game, but there is science behind it. The Cluster17 method is based on clustering, the political-ideological segmentation of society. From a test of 30 questions on the most divisive issues in Spain, to which 5,534 respondents have submitted, they have identified, through the use of a statistical algorithm, 16 clusters, which correspond to the 16 families or Spanish political 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, on these pages. The accompanying illustrations, created by the demographic laboratory, seek to reflect the dominant demographic characteristics of each group.
The positions of individuals on key issues, such as religion, LGBTI rights, immigration, the territorial debate or social aid, are the most decisive factor in their political preferences and their electoral behavior, argues 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 these are attitudes that tend to remain stable and when they evolve, they do so slowly. People don’t change their minds about immigration or abortion over the course of a campaign.
The Cluster17 team spent several months designing the test, which is specific to Spain because the ideological divisions are not the same here as in France or Italy. The territorial question, the monarchy or the Catholic Church articulate identity with the power that in neighboring countries does immigration or trust in the system. The wording of the questions selected for the test deliberately excites polarization, so that those that elicited too diplomatic or tepid answers have been discarded. For each topic, in addition, there is a question in the negative and another in the positive, to capture both the adhesion and the rejection.
The aim is to analyze “how the electoral demand is structured”, Dormagen points out. Beyond what political leaders promise or the issues that dominate the campaign (the supply), their work puts the magnifying glass on the other side: what are the issues that matter most to citizens and that decide their vote, from sometimes maybe without them being aware of it. “The selected measures allow us to read Spanish society, but they are not necessarily programmatic measures. Even if they are not issues that are present in the political debate, your position on them says a lot about who you are, how you think and how you see the world”, explains the expert.
They ask, for example, about the death penalty: although no party brings its establishment 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 makes it possible to understand which is the electoral space of each party, where votes are disputed with other formations and how the electoral competition evolves. With an eye on the elections of July 23, his method makes it possible to identify, for example, which voters Sánchez is at risk of losing, which ideological groups are more mobilized, which fishing grounds Vox is fishing for or which issues it is up to each party to drag out the electoral debate to mobilize its electorate.
