Bipartisanship breakdown, functional networks and forensic analysis in Spanish 2015 and 2016 national elections

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spatial distribution of bipartisanship and applies forensic techniques to vote data from Spanish 2015 and 2016 elections, revealing regional differences and mixed evidence of data conformity and potential irregularities.

Contribution

It provides a high-resolution spatial analysis of bipartisanship breakdown and applies forensic methods to assess vote data integrity in Spanish elections.

Findings

Bipartisanship breakdown is more prominent near urban areas.

Vote data generally conform to Benford's law at national level.

Evidence of potential incremental fraud in vote share and turnout patterns.

Abstract

In this paper we present a social network and forensic analysis of the vote counts of Spanish national elections that took place in December 2015 and their sequel in June 2016. Vote counts are extracted at the level of municipalities, yielding an unusually high resolution dataset with over 8000 samples. We initially consider the phenomenon of Bipartisanship breakdown by analysing spatial distributions of several Bipartisanship indices. We find that such breakdown is more prominent close to cosmopolite and largely populated areas and less important in rural areas where Bipartisanship still prevails, and its evolution mildly consolidates in the 2016 round, with some evidence of Bipartisanship reinforcement which we hypothesize to be due to psychological mechanisms of risk aversion. On a third step we explore to which extent vote data are faithful by applying forensic techniques to vote statistics. We first explore the conformance of first digit distributions to Benford's law for each of the main political parties. The results and interpretations are mixed and vary across different levels of aggregation, finding a general good quantitative agreement at the national scale for both municipalities and precincts but finding systematic nonconformance at the level of individual precincts. As a complementary metric, we further explore the co-occurring statistics of voteshare and turnout, finding a mild tendency in the clusters of the conservative party to smear out towards the area of high turnout and voteshare, what has been previously interpreted as a possible sign of incremental fraud. In every case results are qualitatively similar between 2015 and 2016 elections.