Sánchez-García, ÁlvaroRodon i Casarramona, AntoniDelgado i Garcia, Maria2024-09-202024-09-202025Sánchez-García Á, Rodon T, Delgado-García M. Where has everyone gone? Depopulation and voting behaviour in Spain. Eur J Polit Res. 2025 Feb;64(1):296-319. DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.127020304-4130http://hdl.handle.net/10230/61189Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.In many European countries, people increasingly leave rural or small municipalities to live and work in urban or metropolitan environments. Although previous work on the 'left behind' places has examined the relationship between the rural-urban divide and vote choice, less is known about how depopulation affects electoral behaviour. Is there a relationship between experiencing a loss in population and support for the different parties? We investigate this question by examining the Spanish case, a country where the topic of depopulation has become a salient issue in political competition. Using a newly compiled dataset, we also explore whether the relationship between depopulation and electoral returns is moderated by municipality size, local compositional changes, the loss of public services and changes in amenities. Our findings show that depopulated municipalities give higher support to the main Conservative party, mainly in small municipalities. Yet, municipalities on the brink of disappearance are more likely to give larger support to the far-right. Results overall show that the effect of depopulation seems to be driven by compositional changes, and not as a result of losing public services or a deterioration of the vibrancy of the town. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between internal migration and electoral behaviour.application/pdfeng© 2024 The Author(s). European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/article2024-09-20http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12702Political geographyPublic servicesDepopulationFar-rightSpaininfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess