The Effect of Cultural Aspects on Electoral Behaviour: The Protest Vote.

The last municipal elections have shown a growth in the vote to new electoral office as a blank vote.

For us, this electoral behaviour is an 'exit' electoral strategy, in terms of Hirschman, of the traditional political party arena (1977) which we have called a 'protest vote' (Herrera, Mateos, Navarro, 2017). The objective would be to explore the contextual factors that would facilitate this electoral behaviour.

These contextual aspects will include: a) the influence of the effects of crisis in Spain today, and b) the cultural or symbolic aspects that we will try to measure through the application of a 'cultural scenes' approach. Other demographic aspects (such as age, gender, social position, political attitude) will be controlled in order to understand the importance of the contextual aspect in the emergence of these new and ascending political proposals.

The cultural dimension has been extensively studied and related to analysis of social mobilisations, political participation or innovative processes, among others.

However, we will try to emphasise within the cultural aspect its most symbolic dimension which in turn is more related to the political behaviour of citizens.

Thus, the analysis tries to focus on how some of these contextual aspects will condition, or even act as facilitators for, the possible 'protest vote'. In this sense we rely on the works of Miller and Silver (2015), Silver and Miller, (2014), Rooduijn and Burgoon (2017).

Therefore, our research questions will be the following:

• Do you explain the electoral context through the cultural context? In such a case, is there a cultural scene that promotes a protest vote?

This will be done with secondary data provided by the Ministry of the Interior in the municipal elections of 2015, and data from the Census as well as surveys.