Times of crises: ideology and party system transformations in Spain

The Spanish party system has recently undergone profound changes, marked by the rapid rise and decline of several political actors, such as Podemos and Ciudadanos, who challenged the imperfect two-party system that had characterised Spain since transition. This article examines how three major crises— the global financial crisis, the Catalan secessionist challenge, and the COVID19 pandemic—, have impacted the social imaginary and created opportunities for new framing and electoral competition strategies. Our research reconstructs changes in the Spanish ideological landscape and the relative salience of political cleavages in each of these crises. We argue that they had asymmetric impacts on party politics. Antiestablishment and nationalist populist discourses were effectively used to harness and redirect public discontent against political opponents. Political parties adapted their ideology strategically. Initially, outsider parties took advantage of the drop of trust in public institutions challenging the two-party system, but in the long run, the mainstreaming of populist interpretative frames, paradoxically, ended up consolidating two antagonistic blocs and enabled the resurgence of the two major parties, the PP and PSOE, as undisputed leaders of each of them.