Second fortnight of July. Madrid, Seville, Granada or Salamanca. The photo is the same: entire neighborhoods with hardly any neighbors on the streets. Last summer, the residents of many cities in the interior of the peninsula took advantage of the weeks at the end of July to go on vacation, the same dates on which the general elections are called this year. Will vacation mobility affect participation and electoral results?
The following map shows how many people who live in each municipality or district usually sleep outside the province in the second half of July, according to the data of the Ministry of Transport analyzed by elDiario.es. In brown, the areas that go on vacation the most; in green, those with the least.
The analysis of the daily positioning data of the mobile phones of Spanish residents of each district, municipality and group of municipalities, published by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda and the Nommon company allows us to draw which areas of Spain emptied the most last summer.
The big cities stand out, especially inland, but also other cases such as Barcelona or Bilbao, where one in ten residents was outside their province between July 15 and 31, 2022. In contrast, in other cities in coastal areas or in the archipelagos, the resident population barely decreased during those weeks.
But not only geography matters: income is key when we talk about vacation mobility. Last July in the richest areas more residents left than in the poorest. In the districts and municipalities that make up the 10% of the population with the lowest income, 5% of the residents were away in the second half of July 2022. On the other hand, in the areas that group the 10% of the most affluent population, the percentage increased to 14%.
Does this mean we can expect a bigger drop in participation in these areas? The political scientists consulted by elDiario.es doubt this hypothesis. People who want to vote and go on vacation are going to vote anyway. Those who remain are the excluded and those who never vote, which makes little difference, explains Carmen Lumbierres, a doctor in Political Science from the Complutense University of Madrid.
The data from the INE Living Conditions Survey show who makes up this group that stays at home in summer: 64% of the poorest group of respondents “cannot afford to go on vacation at least once week a year”. Among the richest, the figure drops to 4%. Lumbierres recalls that income and political participation normally go hand in hand: The people who are not going to vote are the people who are not going on vacation. They feel more disaffected because they can’t find solutions in politics.
I don’t think it will affect anything. Who else mobilizes in the elections are those who want change because they are the ones who feel motivated. And the people who want to change now are voting for the right, she adds. inland cities. And those who stay the longest, the poorest, as shown in the following graph.
The mystery of elections in summer is unprecedented in Spain. The only similar case was the autonomous ones in Euskadi and Galicia on July 12, 2020, still with strong mobility restrictions due to the pandemic. “Nobody knows anything and there are no studies on how electoral participation works in summer. In addition, all the studies have collapsed with the new party system and with the volatility of the vote”, affirms the political scientist Carmen Lumbierres.
Voting by mail will be key in these elections, since the preliminary figures that have been disseminated indicate a record level of participation by this means. “Requests to vote by mail are being historic. Today, more than 2 million. There is no precedent,” says Guadalupe Talavera, a professor of Political Science at the Pablo de Olavide University.
A way of voting that is favored by the most politically active voters, according to experts. “You have to have an attitude -the desire to go to the post office twice- or digital skills to ask for it -such as a digital certificate-. A person who is not very participative or does not have digital skills sees the option of voting by mail as far away”, says Talavera.
In which neighborhoods in Spain will most people have to go to the Post Office to be able to vote? In the highest-income districts of cities such as Seville, Granada, Madrid or Salamanca, the percentage of residents who were on vacation last year on the dates the elections were held even exceeded 20%: more than one in five residents he was out of the province, on average, during the last fifteen days of July.
The vacation mobility gap by income level also coincides with a political participation gap. Although poor areas go less on vacation, they are also the neighborhoods that least participate in elections. There is greater political disaffection in the poorest neighborhoods. Less knowledge. They see it further from their realities, adds Talavera. This phenomenon is aggravated in the most segregated cities where the invisible income frontiers are larger.
And the income frontiers usually coincide with the gaps in the percentage of the population that leaves home in summer. In Madrid and Seville the unequal distribution of the population means that, while in the richest districts – Chamberí, Moncloa-Aravaca, Retiro, Salamanca and Chamartín, in Madrid and Nervión, Casco Antiguo, Los Remedios, Bellavista-La Palmera and Triana, in Seville – more than 20% of residents went on vacation, in those with lower income – such as Usera, Puente-Vallecas and Villaverde, in Madrid, and Cerro-Amate and Macarena Norte in Seville – around 12% left of the neighbors.
But even in those cities that do not occupy the first positions in the proportion of people who went on vacation, the differences between rich and poor are obvious. In the affluent Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district of Barcelona, 13% of residents were away in the second half of July, while in Ciutat Vella, the area with the lowest income, only 6% were. Something similar happens in Valencia: in Pla del Real, the richest district, almost 15% of the residents went on vacation in July. In contrast, in the less affluent district, Poblats Oest, those who were not at home represented 6%.
The direction of the vote in elections is usually linked to income. The more conservative parties, such as PP and Vox at the state level, tend to have more support in the wealthier areas of each city, while those on the left – especially the PSOE at the Spanish level – collect a higher percentage of the ballots in the areas and lower-income neighborhoods.
This can be seen, in part, in the following graph, which shows the percentage of votes obtained by each party in the municipalities and districts grouped according to their income level. It should be remembered, however, that the same parties are not voted for in the whole country. Some of the richest municipalities and districts are in the Basque Country and Catalonia, where the regional right not included in these graphs is most powerful.
Usually the richest neighborhoods participate more, which tends to benefit the vote for the parties of the conservative bloc. In addition, the experts do not predict that vacation mobility could jeopardize this vote in these elections. The right-wing voter does not usually punish his own, he mobilizes for a government that gives him economic stability, explains Talavera.
This time there is an added factor that favors PP and Vox. We are in an electoral cycle of change, says Talavera, there are emotional campaigns that are going to mobilize the right and the undecided to the right, as a rejection of the management of Pedro Sánchez.
On the other hand, leftist voters he tends to abstain as a punishment, if he sees that the parties do not represent him, adds the political scientist. Lumbierres agrees with this approach and explains that it is difficult for there to be a large mobilization in favor of the left in poor neighborhoods because that group feeling has been broken.
And one last factor that can make people stay at home: heat. The temperature is something that is going to be worrisome. There will be a long time that the schools will be without people voting, at noon, because it will be too hot, says Guadalupe Talavera. Will it greatly affect electoral mobilization? On July 23 we will clear up doubts.
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