The 2004 Election in Spain: Terrorism, Accountability, and Voting

This article explores the impact of the March 11 terrorist attacks in Madrid on the election for the renovation of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate on March 14, 2004, which led to the defeat of the conservative government of the Popular Party and the inauguration of the Socialist Party (PSOE) government. It examines the extent to which the terrorist attacks changed the voting preferences of Spaniards, and if they did, to what extent they are a necessary and sufficient factor when explaining the defeat of the party in government. The authors answer these questions by discussing the predominant interpretations of the impact of terrorism on electoral choices; analyzing the causal mechanisms behind the impact of terrorism on the electoral results and their empirical relevance; assessing the robustness of these causal mechanisms through different data and arguments; and looking not only at the question of what but also to the issue of how much, using a counterfactual statistical analysis to quantify the impact of the attacks on the election results. On the basis of the analysis of various polls, they conclude that the attacks did not change the voting preferences of Spaniards; rather, voting choices were influenced by negative views of the government's support for the invasion of Iraq and government manipulation when informing the public about the responsibility for the attacks before the elections. Thus, the PP defeat was not caused by the terrible attacks per se, but by the working of the basic mechanisms that ensure democratic accountability. Because the majority of Spaniards felt that the government did not respond to their demands or policy preferences, they punished it at the ballot box.