From the bullring to the ballot box: How cultural symbols shape voting behaviour

Autor principal:
Álvaro Sánchez García (Centro de Estduios Políticos y Constitucionales)
Programa:
Sesión 7, Sesión 7
Día: viernes, 11 de septiembre de 2026
Hora: 09:00 a 10:45
Lugar: 18

Public infrastructures often operate as powerful cultural symbols that shape political behaviour. Building on this insight, this paper argues that bullrings—emblems of traditionalism and nationalist exaltation in Spain—systematically influence electoral preferences. I assemble an original geo-referenced dataset of all bullrings in Spain and evaluate their political consequences using entropy balancing to estimate the effect of municipal exposure on voting choices in four national elections (2015–2023). Municipalities hosting bullrings exhibit significantly higher support for traditional parties, particularly the centre-left PSOE. To probe the underlying spatial mechanisms, I leverage fine-grained census-tract data showing that closer proximity to a bullring is associated with similar patterns of partisan alignment, suggesting a localised socialisation dynamic. Finally, I corroborate the aggregate results with evidence from an original survey, which indicates that individuals socialised in environments featuring bullrings are more inclined to support traditional parties. Together, these findings reveal how historically embedded cultural infrastructures channel political identities and shape democratic competition, underscoring the role of symbolic built environments in contemporary electoral behaviour.

Palabras clave: Political geography, bullfight, social norms, identity, and Spain