What did they vote for in your town in the 1936 elections?

BarcelonaThey didn't know it yet, but the 1936 elections would be the last before the outbreak of the Civil War, five months after the elections. The left-wing parties, united through the Popular Front, which included, among many other parties, the PSOE, the Communist Party, and ERC, achieved victory. However, those results were never fully published by the government of the Second Republic and, until now, were not accessible. This changes thanks to the project that three Catalan researchers published this Thursday after six years of research. Now, anyone interested will be able to know how their town voted in those elections, which even today some historians question to justify General Franco's coup d'état.

"The idea arises because many states offer data from early democracies at the push of a button. In the United Kingdom you have data from the 19th century; in Germany, from the Weimar Republic and in Italy there is also data that goes back in time," explains UPF Political Science professor and ARA collaborator, Toni Rodon. He, along with UB professor Pau Vall-Prat and research assistant Diego Martin-Álvarez, have made sure this is also possible in Spain. For the first time, data from the 1936 elections can be consulted across Spain thanks to the map they have created. All documentation is not only consultable but can be downloaded for free through the Research Data Repository. That referring to Catalonia had, in fact, already been collected by Vall-Prat in a previous investigation, although an interactive map had not yet been published to consult them.

Catalonia, Andalusia, Extremadura, Aragon, Madrid, and a large part of the Valencian Country and the Mediterranean coast were decisive for the victory of the left-wing parties, which were the majority in a large part of the most populated cities. On the other hand, the two Castiles, Asturias, and Navarre voted overwhelmingly for the right-wing parties. In the city of Barcelona, the left-wing parties obtained 63% of the votes; in Madrid 54%; in Seville 64%; and in Valencia 53%.

Until now, the difficulty in obtaining the data was that there were only some studies by historians that collected some of them partially, but no document that encompassed them all. The three researchers had to dive into provincial archives throughout the State to find the missing ones: often provincial bulletins that included handwritten or typed references – which they had to digitize – with the added difficulty that, during the Second Republic, the current electoral system was not used.

Some provinces, however, have not even kept a record of the electoral minutes, which have been lost over time. "In Zamora, for example, there are no results because they were destroyed," explains Rodon, who also refers to Melilla or parts of Galicia. "It is a period that, in many places, they do not want to stir up," he adds to describe some of the obstacles encountered during the investigation. At the moment, the results of the 1936 legislative elections are available, but within a few weeks, those of 1933 and those of 1931 (which were held two months after the municipal elections that gave rise to the Second Republic) will also be available.

A majoritarian electoral system

During the Second Republic, the electoral system was very different from what is used today in any elections in the State. It was a system of partially open lists in which voters could vote for a number of candidates lower than the number of seats to be filled, as the authors of the study recall. This fact benefited electoral coalitions, such as those of 1936 (both the right and the left united to try to maximize results).

Spain was divided into 60-63 multi-member constituencies that broadly coincided with the fifty provinces, although the largest cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Malaga, and Murcia) formed separate urban constituencies. In each constituency, the researchers recall, "the seats were divided beforehand into a block of majorities (approximately 80%) and a block of minorities (approximately 20%)". What does this mean? In a province with ten deputies, for example, each voter could vote for a number of candidates equal to the majority block – meaning, eight votes out of ten possible seats. Since voters could not fill all the seats, the leading coalition was guaranteed the large block; the second-placed received the small one, regardless of how close the result was. Large parties or coalitions ran for the majority block – essential for accumulating enough seats to govern – and small parties for the minority block, although there were also alliances between large coalitions and some small parties to run separately in the two polls (it was forbidden for the same party to be part of both processes).

In 1936, the Popular Front or Left-wing Front obtained 286 seats and approximately 4.6 million votes, and although the National Counter-revolutionary Front (right-wing) garnered 4.5 million votes, the electoral system only awarded it 141 deputies. With the 46 deputies obtained by other center or nationalist parties such as the PNV, the 473 seats in the Congress of Deputies were completed. The elections were held, in the first round, on February 16, and in the second, on March 1, 1936.