ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the political and ideological determinants of the success of the Spanish 15M in mobilizing mass support. It presents comparative analyses of data from public opinion polls carried out in Spain soon after the mass demonstrations peaked. The chapter reviews some of the main characteristics of the protests, the economic background and the national political context, especially institutionalized cleavages, in which they emerged. It discusses the rationale, hypotheses and data sources. Presentation of the findings is organized around three explanatory dimensions namely: the master political cleavage, support for redistribution and the politicized social cleavages of region and religion. The chapter also presents a multivariate analysis to test the robustness of previously examined bivariate relationships. Rather, the purpose is to test the robustness of previously examined bivariate relationships, and to obtain estimates of the relative weight of different predictors and the extent to which they are similar for both the two indicators.
