Institutional Suicide and Elite Coordination: The Spanish Transition Revisited

ABSTRACT

In the literature on democratisation, the Spanish case has a paradigmatic status, especially for the negotiations between the regime and the opposition. While these negotiations did stabilise the new regime, the transition was driven by the regime’s elites. The key event was the approval of the Law for Political Reform in November 1976, when the legislature voted its own demise. The change was done according to the rules of the system. To explain this reform, we offer a formal model of coordination and a statistical analysis of an original dataset of the 531 legislators. The reform was possible because of elites’ belief coordination.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratisation
• Spain
• elites
• coordination
• parliament

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. See, for instance, the discussion of this issue in Medina (2007).

2. As shown in Table 1, these were the law of demonstrations, the law on associations (parties) and the amendment of the penal code. The first law, however, was not passed through a roll call vote and, moreover, there was no significant opposition. Hence, it is not included in the Table. To maximise variation, we have replaced the law on demonstrations with the so-called ‘Letter of the 126ʹ (Escrito de los 126), a protest document against the government’s lenient policy towards the unions (which were still underground). Those who signed, truly hard-liners, were alarmed by the scope and velocity of the Arias’ reform. All legislators had the opportunity to sign it, but only 97 eventually did (for the sake of consistency, support for the ‘Letter of the 126ʹ has been codified in Table 1 as a nay to the reform). In every case, abstention has been grouped with nays, as it was a form of mild opposition. We consider that those who were absent the voting day do not count as opposition to the reform. This is a reasonable and convenient assumption that allows us to classify the entire set of procuradores.

3. Out of these 72 legislators, 69 voted also against the liberalising reform on at least one occasion. Three of them, however, voted for liberalisation but against democratisation. Given its limited number, we have not created a separate category for these three procuradores.

4. ABC (26 October 1976, p. 10).

5. ABC (28 October 1976, p. 15).

6. See for instance, Peñaranda (2012, p. 126), Pradera (1996) and Prego (1995, pp. 555–556).

7. See, e.g. ABC (26 September 1976, p. 7), El País (9 October 1976, p.10), Ya (28 October 1976, p. 12; 7 November 1976, p. 14).

8. La Vanguardia (28 October 1976, p. 13).

9. Actualidad Española, no. 1295 (25–31 October 1976, pp. 19–22).

10. See the online Appendix 2 for a full description.

11. Apart from Sánchez-Cuenca (2014), the only other quantitative study on the LPR is that of Sánchez Navarro (1990), which is purely descriptive, with no multivariate analysis.

12. The dataset is available at https://ignaciosanchezcuenca.com/data/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca

Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca is the Director of the Carlos III-Juan March Instute of Social Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He is the author of The Historical Roots of Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2019) as well as of many papers and books on comparative politics, conflict, electoral behaviour and democratic theory.

Luis Fernando Medina

Luis Fernando Medina is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Instituto Carlos III - Juan March of the Carlos III University de Madrid. His is the author of two books on collective action and voting, A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change (University of Michigan Press, 2007) and Beyond the Turnout Paradox: The Political Economy of Electoral Participation (Springer Verlag, 2017) and papers on the political economy of developing countries and normative theories of justice.