Voters in Catalonia head to the polls to elect regional leaders today in a snap election called by Madrid two months after a separatist referendum for independence was quashed by Spain‘s national government.
In calls for more autonomy, Catalan separatists cite a regional economy that’s outperformed the Spanish national economy for years. There is confidence in regional leadership, and they’re not betting on help from Madrid.
In fact, they don’t seem to be betting on the national government at all.
El Gordo, or “the Fat One,” is an annual Christmas lottery run by the State Lotteries of Spain (SELAE), a public company created by the Spanish Ministry of Finance and Public Administration in 2010. It is the largest lottery in the world — winnings totaled $2.4 billion in 2016 — and it has been estimated that 75 percent of all Spaniards buy a ticket for the big drawing.
But local lottery associations in Catalonia are predicting significant declines in sales for the national Christmas lottery this year. The Provincial Lottery Association of Girona, a city about an hour north of Barcelona, predicts a 30 percent drop, according to a local news outlet.
El Gordo ticket sales in Catalonia increased last year, accounting for about 15 percent of all national sales. But the region hasn’t been able to sell nearly as many tickets this year. Instead, regional leaders are promoting a local lottery, La Grossa, which also translates to “the Fat One” in the regional Catalan dialect.
The winning numbers for El Gordo will be pulled on Friday, less than 24 hours after the polls close in Catalonia. La Grossa isn’t until December 31. But it’s possible that today’s vote in Catalonia will be influenced in part by lotteries of Christmases past.
Many studies have drawn connections between positive perceptions of the economy and voter support of incumbents, regardless of whether the the incumbent’s policies were directly involved.
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Political Economy found that lottery winners, particularly those who collect winnings from El Gordo, create those same positive associations between winning the lottery and incumbents in Spanish elections as they do with positive perceptions of the economy. In fact, incumbents received approximately one additional vote for every two winning lottery tickets. These positive associations can remain for up to two years after a lottery win, says Manuel Bagues, co-author of the report and associate professor of economics at Aalto University in Finland.
The last time a winning number was pulled in Catalonia was in Barcelona in 2013. Outside of Barcelona, wins in Catalonia date back decades.
Bagues says he cannot rule out an inverse negative effect that would cause non-winners to form unfavorable views of incumbents, or perhaps draw them away from a national lottery to a regional one. But, he says, he doubts that the effects of the lottery were large enough to affect the separatist movement in any way.
Global voting behavior is notoriously unpredictable. In their book “Democracy for Realists,” political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels examine the irrationality of democracy. They highlight the curious case of New Jersey in 1916 in which Woodrow Wilson lost his home state in the presidential election after a string of deadly shark attacks on the Jersey shore.
But Like Bagues, Luis Moreno Fernandez, a research professor at the Spanish National Research Council, would also not overstate any emotional or behavioral effect the lottery will have on today’s regional election.
“The long-standing question remains concerning which is the most prevalent, or compelling, of the elements in the aggregation of voters’ preferences,” he says. “No question about it. The main cleavage for [today’s] election is secessionism versus non-secessionism. In contrast with the 2016 elections , the motivations are now clear-cut.”
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Catalan Separatist Movement Extends to the Spanish Christmas Lottery originally appeared on usnews.com
