Public observatories
🔍 Public observatories
Public administrations set up observatories to monitor a subject (gender-based violence, housing, climate change, retail…) and publish reports on it. This page summarises the census maintained by observatoriospublicos.es: how many there are, who creates them, when they were set up and whether they are still active.
Trend
Trend · percent
When they were created
Observatories created each year and cumulative total. Only 194 of the 520 have a creation date in the census, so the bars fall short. Among those with a date, 65% were set up in 2015 or later (the most recent ones also tend to have better-documented dates).
Who creates them and how many are still active
By level of administration. The census only marks 7 observatories as closed; of the total, 50% have no information on whether they are still operating.
By autonomous community
Regional, provincial and local observatories in each autonomous community, per million inhabitants. The region is taken from the scope stated in the census or, if it is not stated, from the observatory's name: the municipality (matched against INE's list), the island or province, or the demonym ("Andaluz", "Galego"…). 50 remain unassigned because their name gives no clue ("Observatorio Social", "Observatorio del Agua"…).
Who was in government when they were created
Each observatory with a year of creation is attributed to the party that governed the creating administration in the middle of that year: the Spanish Government for state observatories, the regional presidency for regional ones and the mayoralty for municipal ones. This attributes 160 of the 520 observatories in the census: the rest have no creation date, belong to a provincial council or island council (16, with no data on who chaired them) or cannot be located. In 15 cases the government changed that same year and the attribution is less certain.
A simple count favours whoever has governed longest, and also whoever governs now: more and more observatories are being created (and the census documents recent ones better). To adjust for this, the table compares the observed observatories with those expected if each party had followed the trend of the rest of the census in the years it governed (for state observatories, the trend of regional and local ones, which do not depend on the Spanish Government). A ratio of 1 is what would be expected; 2, double; 0.5, half.
Once the trend is discounted, in the Spanish Government the PSOE creates 1.21 times the expected number and the PP 0.54 times: a larger difference than chance would explain, albeit with few cases. In the regions, the PSOE stands at 1.14 and the PP at 0.88: a difference that chance can explain.
All observatories
Source: observatoriospublicos.es, a citizen-run census of observatories of Spanish public administrations. The level and region are inferred from the scope stated in the census and, where it is not stated, from the observatory's name (INE municipalities, islands, provinces and demonyms). The status "Sin información" means the census does not say whether the observatory is still active. Party: presidencies of the Spanish Government and of the autonomous communities checked against Wikidata and official sources, and mayors from the Local Information System of the Ministry of Territorial Policy (who governs each municipality).