Voting under repression

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Pau Vall-Prat, an Assistant Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona.

What drives individuals to participate in elections held under autocratic regimes? Do democratic experiences shape behavior in non-democratic contexts? This paper addresses these questions using a unique dataset of individual voting records from the 1947 referendum held under Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. We analyse the determinants of turnout in an authoritarian plebiscite and assess how prior democratic experience and wartime exposure influenced participation. We first describe the individual-level correlates of turnout—demographic, occupational, and contextual factors—and then test whether prior exposure to democracy affected participation under autocracy by exploiting variation in voting eligibility during the Spanish Second Republic. We complement this with a panel dataset tracing turnout behavior in the 1930s for part of the sample. Finally, we examine whether exposure to the Spanish Civil War shaped engagement with autocratic voting. Our results reveal meaningful variation in turnout and regime support across voters and precincts. Democratic experience increases the likelihood of voting in an autocratic referendum, particularly among women, though a strong democratic commitment reduces such participation. In turn, exposure to conflict reduces the likelihood to turn out, and we provide suggestive evidence of the importance of coercive mechanisms. Overall, the findings show that even in coercive settings, legacies of democracy continue to shape political behavior under authoritarian rule.

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