The continuing debate on democratization in Spain.

The Spanish process of democratization has been presented by many political observers as a model that others can follow or at least learn from, and indeed it has attracted very considerable interest in both Latin America and Eastern Europe among politicians seeking to develop new democratic regimes in their home countries. There are two reasons why the Spanish experience has been distilled into a model. First, as a former imperial power with persisting (if often neglected) links with Latin America, Spain is a point of reference for a broader international community, reinforced in the early 1990s by an initiative to build an Iberian commonwealth. Second, the Spanish road to democracy is widely viewed by political elites elsewhere as an ideal path to follow. For despite a background of bitter civil war and deep divisions maintained by the Franco regime, Spain moved very rapidly to a new consensus regarding democratic rules of the game and proceeded with democratization in an orderly fashion, avoiding the unrest that accompanied the contemporaneous political transition in Portugal. The Spanish process was surrounded by a broad consensus among moderate forces as more extreme elements lost influence or were forced to adapt to the new system. A substantial part of the old elite was persuaded of the need for democratization.

Of course, models usually prove of limited relevance to other national situations and often do no more than simply inspire efforts elsewhere. What makes the Spanish experience fundamentally different to that of Eastern Europe is the dramatic process of economic growth, modernisation and limited market liberalisation that occurred during the 1960s and early 1970s, which conspired to make the authoritarian regime anachronistic even in the eyes of part of the Francoist elite. Some authors have presented the demands of Spanish capitalism as being behind many of the economic changes introduced in Spain from the late 1950s, which both served to strengthen the opposition forces and to convince a growing proportion of the ruling elites of the need for political change.[1] There are no problems with presenting the economic and political developments in too deterministic a fashion, however. Robert Fishman has shown how the introduction of collective bargaining, which facilitated the revival of the labour movement during the 1960s, was in fact opposed by Spanish capitalists at the time: for Fishman, this step had far more to do with political factors, namely the Franco regime's desire to legitimate and institutionalise itself.[2] Another

important development unrelated to the economy was the process of generational change that occurred as veterans from the 1930s departed from the political scene in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, perhaps the main contrast with the Latin American cases of regime change resides in the importance of the EC dimension for democratization in Spain. Whereas the former authoritarian regime was considered ineligible for membership of the European Community, the new regime benefited from EC solidarity and the process of European integration made it increasingly difficult for anti-democratic elements in Spain to offer a credible scenario for the future. This underlines the importance of international factors in influencing the outcome of attempts at democratization, a dimension that is often lost in attempts to present certain national examples as models.

Among those who study the Spanish experience of democratization, there is far less consensus today than there was a decade ago about the nature of the political transition itself. Once the early fears about unaccountable centres of power |conditioning' the new democracy had been reduced by the growth of political parties, with their prominent role in the construction of the new political system, a substantial degree of consensus existed for a while among writers analysing the nature of the democratic transition. It is above all since attention has been turned to |democratic consolidation' that controversy has grown, even to the point of new differences belatedly appearing in relation to the |transition' period. The southern European countries have been the main focus of this controversy, with Spain right at the heart of it.

The transition to democracy

The Spanish transition has given rise to a vast literature.[3] The main corpus of this has focused on three aspects of the democratization process: the way in which constitutional continuity was maintained in the period from Franco's death in 1975 to the first democratic election in 1977; the consensual experience that led to the Moncloa Pact signed by the major political parties in autumn 1977, primarily as a response to rising inflation; and the continuation of the consensual approach in the drafting of the constitution in 1977-78. |Transition by transaction' is the dominant theme in this literature. Some observers even take the consensual nature of the process to denote the existence of a period of consociational democracy, a view rightly dismissed by Andrea Bonime-Blanc on the grounds that governments were not formed by coalitions representing the major socio-political segments of society: the Spanish transition was simply marked by accommodational political behaviour, with party leaders setting the main example.[4]

The consensus achieved was essentially among political parties, although important interests were generally consulted or borne in mind. Many of the difficult issues were negotiated first by the governing Union of the Democratic Centre and the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, and then discussed with other parties, with the most difficult partner, the right-wing conservative Popular Alliance being involved relatively late in the constitution-making process so as not to impede progress. By involving the non-governing parties in the design of the system's framework, Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez helped ensure that the only significant anti-system forces in Spain would be limited to the regional level and essentially to the Basque Country, home of the separatist movement ETA and its supportive electoral alliance.

The Spanish transition is most commonly seen as ending in 1978-79 with the promulgation of the 1978 constitution, followed in 1979 by the staging of the first normal (non-constituent) general election, the holding of the first democratic municipal elections since the 1930s, and approval of the Basque and Catalan autonomy statutes. Juan Linz regards democratic transitions as ending earlier, as soon as elected governments have assumed power without any need to share power with non-elected bodies.[5] Yet most other writers have focused on the constitutional process itself, for this determined the extent to which unassailable democratic principles were to replace the Political Reform law of 1976, which itself contained a number of undemocratic safeguards designed to placate Francoist diehards.

Moreover, the new constitution itself only ordained in broad principles that Spain was to be divided into |autonomous communities', regional units which would have their own layer of government in a system that would be a compromise between a unitary state and a federal one. The details regarding regional competences were only filled in subsequently, in the course of negotiations between the government and provisional regional authorities, which led to statutes for a total of 17 autonomous communities being approved by 1983. Although the actual process of devolving powers to regional governments would take several more years, from the perspective of some advocates of regional power 1983 marked the symbolic ending of the transition period. Of course, this moment came earlier for several of the regions, especially the Basque Country and Catalonia which were in the vanguard of the devolution process.

A rather different, although less representative view of the Spanish transition, is held by some specialists concerned with the country's external relations.[6] The transition is sometimes deemed to have consisted itself of three transitions: a political transition in the mid and late 1970s; an economic transition marked by structural adjustment policies and a series of socio-economic pacts in the early 1980s; and an international transition completed in 1986-89 with Spain's entry into the EC, the confirmation of Spanish membership of NATO through a referendum, the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel, and the Spanish presidency of the EC (1989). These international events were certainly likely corollaries of the type of domestic political transition undertaken, but should hardly be regarded as part of the democratic transition itself, for they refer more to the transformation of Spain in general than to its political regime. In this regard, Spain is arguably different to Greece where foreign policy stances have traditionally been very intimately bound up with domestic political alignments.

Conceptually, the only fundamental divergence of opinion (once the transition versus pseudo-transition debate had been resolved) has been over whether democratic transition should be analysed as a primarily elite phenomenon or at the mass level. Initially, it appeared that this difference of emphasis might reflect the approach of different disciplines, with political scientists focusing on political elites and sociologists looking at democratization as a product of social transformation, but it has since become clear that the difference of emphasis also exists among political scientists. The elite theorists protectively acknowledge the importance of mass pressures and constraints upon elites but maintain that it is still elites that are central to democratization, since it is they who take the initiatives that lead to elite consensus. John Higley and Richard Gunther define democratic consolidation as |elite consensual unity within a fully democratic system', a state of affairs arising from an elite settlement, elite convergence or a combination of the two. Some of the contributors to their volume, however, express disagreement with the notion that one can simply focus on elites, reducing the role of the masses to that of an approving audience.[7]

A left-wing variant of the elitist view is that it was Spain's political and labour elites in the late 1970s that were responsible for popular disillusionment with the new democracy, because they deliberately demobilised mass movements that were pressing for more radical change. In fact, the evidence presented by Victor Perez-Diaz and Robert Fishman shows Spanish workers at this time to have been generally moderate.[8]

Lending credibility to the elite focus are facts about the Spanish transition that nobody contests. Since it approximated more to a reform from above than to a |ruptura democratica'--a radical break with Francoism in which a provisional government would have presided over the preparation of elections--the transition did involve vital inter-elite collaboration, and political parties and their leaders were the central actors during the transition years. Moreover, the King played an unexpectedly positive role, exploiting the advantage of his having been chosen by Franco as successor but also asserting his own personality and using his crucial authority over the restless military. He has been called with some exaggeration the |pilot' of the Spanish transition.[9]

The alternative approach adopts a mass focus which is justified along the lines that, without the revival of civil society and growing pressures for political change, it is unlikely that such important sectors of the Francoist elite would ever have adopted reform strategies aimed at genuine democratization. Both Perez Diaz and Joe Foweraker see the main impulses to move from Francoism to democracy as coming from civil society.[10] More generally, those who adopt this approach to the change of regime in Spain focus upon mass opposition to Francoism from students and workers and the behaviour of labour organisations and public opinion during the transition. They also emphasize the role played by the trade unions, together with the Spanish Confederation of Employers' Organisations, in reducing social tension, facilitating democratic consolidation through their readiness to enter into pacts relating to the organisation of industrial relations and other socio-economic matters.

In principle, elite and mass perspectives are by no means mutually exclusive, yet in practice writers have opted for one or the other. To date, nobody has systematically attempted to integrate elite and mass focuses in order to explore the dynamics of elite-mass interaction during the political transition. This relationship clearly requires exploration and is seen by Maurizio Cotta as a priority area for future research.[11]

The debate about consolidation

Much greater controversy surrounds the notion of democratic consolidation. One view is that it is an endless process, that democracy is never fully consolidated. More commonly, observers feel that there comes a point when democracies can be regarded as |consolidated', but there is a major divergence here between holding |minimalist' and |maximalist' views.

The minimalist view, defended by Giuseppe Di Palma,[12] has been strongly influenced by the work of juan Linz, although he himself has warned others against the dangers of adopting so minimal a view of consolidation that they risk identifying it with the completion of the transition process. The minimalists contend that democracy is consolidated when it is stable, stability being brought about by the achievement of an elite consensus concerning the rules of the game. This consensus need only be procedural: participants do not need to be true democrats so long as they play by the rules; and there is anyway a strong tendency for such |tactical' players to adopt habits and attitudes that are conducive to regime stability in order to succeed at the democratic game. Put another way, democracies become consolidated as the threats to them (from the military or significant anti-system political forces) disappear. To paraphrase Linz, consolidation occurs when none of the major political actors, parties and organised interests consider that there is any alternative to democratic processes as a means of gaining power: the political players see democracy as the only game available.[13]

A more |maximalist' view has been presented in the volume entitled Securing Democracy, edited by Geoffrey Pridham.[14] In this, it is argued that democratic consolidation is not only a matter of the above processes but also of changes in civil society, essentially a transformation of the political culture. According to this view, it is not sufficient for civil society to indicate conformity with new democratic institutions by simply voting in elections and acknowledging regime legitimacy through opinion polls: democracy has to become firmly rooted in society. Among other things, democratic consolidation is seen to require evidence of a growth in associationalism in order to provide civil society with regular input into the political system.

A somewhat extreme version of this position is to be found in the work of Howard Wiarda, who maintains that there is insufficient evidence of a participatory civic political culture for Spanish democracy to be regarded as consolidated.[15] His critics object that he sets such strict criteria for the consolidation of the new Iberian democracies that many of the long-established democracies of the world would fall the test. It may also be said that his critique of Iberian democracy uses some evidence that reflects upon the quality of those democracies rather than addressing the process of consolidation itself.

Reacting against the maximalist view in recent years, some minimalists have in fact reinterpreted the Spanish transition, so that events that were being analysed a decade ago as forming part of the Spanish transition are now being discussed (and in much the same way) as forming part of the process of democratic consolidation, with the |transition' being pushed back now to the years 1976-77: from the appointment of Adolfo Suarez as Prime Minister by the King, through his introduction of the Political Reform law in 1976, up to the general election of June 1977. Of course, many writers have argued that there is a degree of temporal overlap between transition and consolidation, that consolidation may commence almost as soon as the transition is under way, or at least that the foundations of democratic consolidation may be laid during the transition process, but it is only now, quite a long time after the event, that some of the minimalists are locating the transition in the period before the first Spanish general election in 1977.

How are these divergent criteria for democratic consolidation applied more specifically to the Spanish case? As seen by the minimalists, Spain's new democracy became consolidated by the end of 1982, that is, very soon after the major coup attempt associated internationally with the figure of Colonel Antonio Tejero in February 1981. This threat to the fledgling democracy shook Spanish democrats out of a certain complacency concerning the stability of the new order: civilian repudiation of the rebels was widespread, solidarity among the political parties grew, and dissident military elements were thus left feeling extremely isolated. Minimalists see the threat to democracy fading very rapidly following the election of the Socialist Party to office in October 1982, Gonzalez's government being the first to enjoy an absolute majority in both houses of parliament. Despite the shift to the left signalled by the election result, the new government's policies soon found favour among some of the more conservative sectors of society. Linz does not see the alternation of parties in office itself as a prerequisite for democratic consolidation: otherwise democracy could not be regarded as fully consolidated in either Japan or Italy.[16]

With regard to the ensuing period in Spain, the minimalists are concerned only about the terrorism of ETA and the significant rejection of the Spanish constitutional settlement among Basque nationalists more broadly. Herri Batasuna, the party giving voice to ETA's politics, continued to receive about one-sixth of the popular vote among the Basque population during the 1980s. Yet the presence of this anti-system force is not seen by the minimalists as actually having prevented democratic consolidation, given that the problem has been confined to just one |small region' of the country.[17] Indeed, it is seen as a mark of democratic consolidation that the new regime was able to cope with this challenge and to survive without making concessions to the terrorists.

The more sceptical view which I presented in a chapter in Securing Democracy was a reflection upon Spain's political evolution up to mid-1988. While some very important signs of progress were emphasized, there were two main areas of lingering doubt. Among the encouraging developments were that, despite instability in the party system, electoral competition clearly revolved around attracting the large moderate centre of the electorate; the military were showing signs of much greater respect for government, which was modernising as well as reforming them; further devolution seemed to have undermined the separatist threat, and ETA was clearly in decline, in part due to cross-border cooperation between Spain and France. The remaining doubts related to the party system and evidence that the political culture associated with the Francoist period had not been sufficiently transformed.

At this time, the Spanish party system was clearly not meeting some of the criteria for democratic consolidation defended by some Spanish social scientists. The party system continued to be unstable, thus defying the criteria laid down by Jose Maravall and Julian Santamaria,[18] and there was still no viable centre-right alternative to the Socialist Party (PSOE), an absence seen as an impediment to consolidation by Pilar del Castillo and Giacomo Sani.[19] Moreover, the results of the 1982 and 1986 elections seemed to point in the direction of the possible establishment of a |predominant' party system, as defined by Sartori. Such a system, dominated by the PSOE, would not necessarily be a problem for democratic development, yet had certainy been so in some well known cases, such as post-revolutionary Mexico.

Given the governing party's increasing penetration of the state and public sector, the result of much more extensive use of patronage than in the recent past, and the Socialists' manipulation of the (still then) state-controlled television media at election times, there were fears about PSOE |prepotencia'. Even King Juan Carlos, in his 1989 Christmas message, rebuked the Socialists for their heavy-handed style of government. If the party continued to enjoy absolute majorities in parliament right through into the 1990s, the fear in some quarters was that its domance could become so great that the constitution might provide inadequate safeguards to allow opposition parties to compete effectively.

These worries, expressed in sections of the media and on the left as well as on the right, were sometimes reinforced by concern about the weakness of the parties at the grass-roots, and about the underdevelopment of associations representing interests that in many other democratic systems seemed to be able to lobby government much more successfully than in Spain. While evidence of a growth in party membership was counteracted by a marked decline of democracy within the PSOE, and perhaps in other parties too, trade unions--by far the most important mass-membership interest groups--were showing symptoms of decline. From grouping 56% of industrial workers in 1978, affiliation had declined to just 34% by 1980; among workers and employees affiliation had reached a peak of 40% before falling to between 10 and 15% in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the case of some other groups, meanwhile, there were doubts about their autonomy: some had been created or were sponsored by the governing party and tended to reflect its own objectives instead of working for an agenda of their own. The government's refusal to listen to other groups led in some cases to militant direct action, starting with an attempt by the communist-led Workers' Commissions to organise a general strike in 1985 and continuing with successful mobilisations by school students two years later.

The strengthening of democracy?

Over the last five years there have been a number of positive developments which may point to a strengthening of democracy, although the evidence is somewhat mixed. While the threat of PSOE |predominance' has receded and centre-periphery tensions have been reduced through agreements between moderate Basque forces and the central government, there must still be questions about how far the behaviour and attitudes of both the governors and the governed have adapted to the existence of what are clearly stable, regularly functioning democratic institutions. Mounting evidence of corruption among politicians and the absence of evidence to indicate a strengthening of popular associationalism both shed doubt on whether Spanish democracy can strictly be described as |consolidated'.

After a total of five general elections since the death of Franco, and with a sixth to be held during 1993, the Spanish party system has still not settled down to become a classifiable type. At different times and by different observers, it has been presented tentatively as a predominant party system, a bipolar system, or a multi-party system of one type or another. It may be that the party system is reverting to the multi-party model that Spain had in the late 1970s, only perhaps with three nationwide parties instead of four, plus a number of more or less significant parties based in the regions of Spain. Recent electoral and survey evidence suggests that the space occupied by a centre party in Spanish politics (before the Union of the Democratic Centre, more recently the Social and Democratic Centre) has been occupied by the major parties of the left and right as they have concentrated their efforts on appealing to the mass of the electorate that is found broadly in the centre of the ideological spectrum.

The one unequivocal development is the loss of the PSOE's predominance. Now feeling the effects of the attrition associated with a decade in government, and having lost part of its |progressive' and industrial labour support to the Communist-dominated United Left, the Socialist Party is about to lose its absolute majority in parliament; for the first time since 1982, even its tenure of office is in question. Since reaching a peak of 48% of the popular vote in that year, its support has gradually fallen, dropping to just below 40% in 1989, when it ended up with only a |technical' parliamentary majority: precisely half the seats in the lower house, which was converted into a majority as a result of the absence of Basque separatist deputies belonging to Herri Batasuna. With the governing party's fortunes affected since then by economic recession and corruption scandals, the PSOE now risks defeat, and in the best of circumstances will remain in office only if it can negotiate pacts with other parliamentary forces.

What has led to this situation has not been just the misfortunes of the PSOE but also the emergence of an electable centre-right party, the People's Party. This party is a direct descendant of the more right-wing Popular Alliance, which was |refounded' as the People's Party in 1989, when small Christian Democratic and Liberal parties which had earlier been allied to the Alliance joined forces in a single party. Affiliated internationally as a Christian Democratic rather than a Conservative paty, it also offers a new image at the leadership level. Jose Maria Aznar is a young leader whose open and friendly manner contrasts sharply with the more authoritarian image projected on occasions by former Alliance leader Manuel Fraga (today regional president of Galicia). Having gained ground at the expense of the Social and Democratic Centre, recent survey evidence indicates that the People's Party has closed the electoral gap between it and the Socialist Party. Both parties were shown by polls in March 1993 to be attracting about 36% of the popular vote, whereas the old Popular Alliance had been stuck throughout the 1980s on about 26%.

As noted earlier, the emergence of an electable opposition party after a decade in which this was manifestly lacking was seen by some observers as a prerequisite for democratic consolidation. The application of this criterion is complicated, however, by the fact that there was such an opposition in the period 1977-82, when the PSOE was clearly the opposition party and was quite credible as the source of an alternative government, especially given the growing popularity of Felipe Gonzalez in the late 1980s. It is more the passing of the threat of |predominance' in the party system that enables us to see the Spanish democracy becoming more consolidated.

Relations between central and regional government are likely to throw up crises from time to time and it is this area where the greatest potential for regime destabilisation exists. Yet a real improvement in relations between the ruling Socialists and the moderate Basque and Catalan nationalist parties has been seen since the mid-1980s. The PSOE has collaborated with the Catalan Convergence and Unity alliance over a number of issues and even entered a coalition with the Basque Nationalist Party to form a Basque regional government in the latter half of the 1980s. Cooperation with the Catalan alliance is of greater parliamentary value to the PSOE, since (in addition to dominating the Catalan regional institutions) it regularly wins 18 to 20 seats in Madrid. Yet the overall value to the Socialists of collaboration with the Basque party is out of all proportion to the Basque party's handful of seats in Madrid, and lies in its potential to undermine centre-periphery tensions in the case of the region with by far the strongest separatist current.

Improved relations with the Basque Nationalist Party have come about mainly in the wake of an internal split in the mid-1980s. The departure of one sector to found a new party deprived it of its former regional dominance and the result in 1987-90 was a coalition government with the Socialists in the Basque Country. Relations between the coalition partners improved significantly, and this helped the PSOE to gradually involve all of the Basque parties apart from Herri Batasuna in agreements whereby they all affirmed their loyalty to the constitution, having been only |semi-loyal' in some cases earlier on; and the same parties now clearly repudiated ETA, leaving the apologists for separatist terrorism much more isolated and deprived of legitimacy.

Interacting with this political process was a contemporaneous weakening of ETA, although Herri Batasuna was rather slower in showing signs of decline. ETA has been undermined as a result of three factors. One of them was an improvement in bilateral relations between Spain and France, which has deprived ETA of what were relatively secure and untroubled bases in southern France, from which operations were launched on the other side of the Pyrenees. Another was ETA's increasingly less discriminate use of violence in the second half of the 1980s as it became weaker and grew impatient over Madrid's refusal to make political concessions. Certainly, Herri Batasuna, which in the past enjoyed a degree of sympathy in other parts of Spain (shown by the results of elections to the European Parliament), has seen its support restricted to parts of the Basque Country itself. The third factor has been the almost total implementation of the Statute of Guernica of 1979, which laid down the powers of the Basque regional institutions. Despite the centre putting a brake on devolution between 1982-85 to placate military opinion in the aftermath of the 1981 coup attempt, the momentum of devolution was regained in the second half of the 1980s. Thus today it is less easy for regionally-based politicians to claim that the autonomy process has been a sham, even if Basque and Catalan politicians have been calling recently for additional prerogatives just for the |historic' regions or |nationalities' of Spain.

Progress on the Basque question was particularly worked for by the Socialists, because in the late 1970s and early 1980s terrorism and separatist challenges to the state acted as critical catalysts of conspiracies within the Spanish army. It seems fairly clear that the latter have lost force in recent years. Although there is worrying evidence that since 1982 the public has been deprived of information about a number of military plots, at least until well after the event,[20] rebel tanks have not taken to the streets since 1981. Instead, military reactionaries have turned from coup conspiracies to terrorism including a plan to blow up the King and senior government ministers during a military parade in 1985. This is doubtless a sign of weakness and desperation, with less chance today of critically destabilising democracy than the coup attempt had in 1981.

However, while the threats to democracy seem to have receded still further and the non-democratic forces are very weak, there are few signs of growth among the associations that seek to present sectoral demands to governmental authorities. In the maximalist perspective, this is evidence of the fact that, no matter how widely the democratic regime is accepted as legitimate, its roots remain somewhat tenuously embedded in civil society. At best, the unions seem to have halted the decline which they suffered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the Employers' Confederation has consolidated its position as the mouthpiece for big business, but probably the only politically-oriented association to experience impressive growth over the last decade has been Greenpeace, an organisation whose actions have captured the imagination of tens of thousands of Spaniards in a short space of time, despite being run in a wholly undemocratic fashion itself.

It is because associations are weak that groups seeking to press their demands have sporadically resorted to direct action, such as the general strike that paralysed the economy in December 1988 and the less successful strike attempted in May 1992. The key to the effectiveness of the 1988 strike was a fusion of union protest over issues evoking a lot of public sympathy with more general public dissatisfaction with the Socialist government. The unions were protesting over the way in which an increasing use of short-term labour contracts was undermining security in employment and the unions' own organisational development, and over the lack of social protection for a majority of those out of work. Many who backed the strike had their own agendas, however: some were protesting over the way in which the government's priority of economic growth was now eclipsing its early commitment to social reform, others felt that Socialist ministers were becoming too arrogant and high-handed, or simply wanted to complain about deterioration in the public services.

So far as the democratic system is concerned, what was negative about the 1988 general strike was that workers felt it was necessary to paralyse the economy and take to the streets in order to voice their disapproval of certain government policies. Implicitly, the institutinal mechanisms available for seeking modifications in public policy had proved inadequate. What was positive about the strike was that a major mass mobilisation which challenged the government's authority was not used by its promoters to try to destabilise the system, and it did not have a destabilising effect, although the government did subsequently call for an early general election, arguably to regain legitimacy. Workers' protests were at least channelled in an organised and responsible way by the trade unions, which strongly opposed the use of violence. Spanish democracy showed its maturity by being unshaken by the event. The government suffered a political blow but recovered face by rallying widespread support in parliament for its economic policies; only after this, and particularly after losing considerable industrial working-class support in the election of October 1989, did Gonzalez's government make some concessions to the unions, involving an increase in social expenditure.

Since that time, deficiences in Spanish democracy have also been suggested by a succession of cases of corruption which have besmirched the public images of the Socialist and People's parties alike. The many examples that have come to light of officials receiving payments from firms to which contracts have been awarded suggest that public office is still seen by a number of office-holders as having little to do with the notion of serving the public. What has changed is that, whereas in the Franco years political corruption involved individual enrichment, democracy has made it a common practice for officials to seek |commissions' not so much as a means of personal reward, but as a means of financing party activities, and perhaps even to finance particular factions within the PSOE. The Filesa scandal of the early 1990s involves allegations that money was donated by companies to a fictitious company established by PSOE officials supposedly in payment for |reports' which were never produced. Spain's parties are state-subsidised, at levels related to their success at the polls, but their legitimate income is much less than they spend and straight donations from companies are forbidden by law: hence the temptation to set up |front' companies or to take bribes for contracts.

The apparent increase in corruption would appear to bear some relation to the extensive increase in the use of patronage by the Socialist government, which led to numerous posts being filled by officials who owed their positions to their party bosses rather than a meritocratic rise through the hierarchy of ministries or public companies. Only in the early 1990s did the government plan to legislate in order to delineate more clearly the boundary between government and administration. Clearly, a broader problem of elitism throughout the Spanish |political class', as a legacy from Francoism, also forms part of this problem, which has affected parties of both right and left.

A further dimension to political corruption is provided by the fact that it is sometimes foreign companies that have been involved in the recent scandals: faced with fierce competition between Siemens and Alsthom for contracts relating to the Madrid-Seville high-speed train project, Spain's efforts to avoid offending either company underlines the country's dependence on good economic relations with both Germany and France.

Just as disappointing as the corruption revelations themselves and the impression they give of politicians, is the fact that, according to public opinion polls, the public showed very little concern about corruption scandals before 1993. Accustomed to stories of corruption during the Franco years, the adult population did not regard persisting political corruption as an electoral issue--especially since no particular party had a monopoly on malpractices of this type. Significantly, it has been young people, especially university students, who on several recent occasions have given members of the government a roasting on this issue when they have gone to address university audiences. Corruption only became a major issue for the general public in 1993, after certain judges and newspapers had worked persistently for several years to uncover official malpractices, and with the political crisis in Italy (where corruption has evidently been much more widespread) also alerting the Spanish electorate to the unsatisfactory presence of organised corruption in their democracy.

This seems to bear out the view of Sinova and Tusell that there is only a weak civic consciousness in Spain, where only one in four people are reported to have any interest in politics.[21] A readiness to leave politics to the |political class' was already in evidence in the way in which, despite a strong mainly left-wing campaign calling for Spain's departure from NATO in 1986, a public that was clearly sceptical about the benefits of membership voted in a referendum to endorse the pro-Alliance view of the government.

Part of the problem relates to the political culture of Spain, but also involved are the existing arrangements for party financing and the conduct of election campaigns, as well as the weakness of popular involvement in political parties. The law relating to party finances is beginning to be amended and Gonzalez himself has taken a strong public stand on the issue, insisting that corruption must be rooted out of his own party if he is to remain at the helm. However, one feature of party financing that is likely to remain is that most of the parties receive no more than about 5% of their audited income (let alone their real income) from the dues of their rank-and-file members, in spite of some positive efforts by the parties to encourage affiliation (for example, by establishing quotas for the representation of women on party bodies).

Conclusion

Spain's democracy is clearly a stable one, unchallenged by any threatening anti-system force. Less preoccupied with internal stability than a decade ago, its government these days even invests resources in attempts to promote democratic solutions to conflicts overseas, from Central America to Angola.

Yet the controversies surrounding the Spanish experience of democratisation remain the subject of academic debate and it is difficult to see an end to them. Any evaluation of the current status of Spain with respect to democratic consolidation will depend very much on one's notion of the concept itself. One response to the dilemma, which has been used by Kevin Featherstone in relation to Greece, is to try to reconcile the two positions by regarding democracy as |minimally consolidated' when direct threats to the democratic system disappear, while still holding on to the idea that full consolidation is a much more protracted process, relating not only to elites but also to the relationship between the political system and the people in general. Others have regarded this compromise as a means of avoiding the issues. The alternatives are to opt for a minimalist or maximalist approach, or to discard the notion of democratic consolidation altogether because of the problematic open-endedness that it implies. It may be that the post-transition phase could be discussed less controversially in terms of stabilisation, legitimacy and habituation.

But the major challenge ahead of scholars interested in democratization is not necessarily to try to achieve a consensus on the issue. It is arguably a greater priority to address the relationships that exist between the political elites and the non-political elites, and between the mass level and elites, during the process of democratization. One suspects that, while media coverage of Spanish politics, and a fair part of the story itself, provide two reasons why elite studies have featured so prominently in the democratization literature, another reason may be that elite analysis presents fewer methodological problems to political scientists to analysis of the masses and the relationships between the two. Although we now have a massive literature on the subject of democratization in Spain, we still have a very incomplete view of the process. Perhaps when we have a clearer view of the picture |down below', we shall be in a position to enrich the discussion about consolidation. (1) J. Maravall, The Transition to Democracy in Spain, Croom Helm, 1982. (2) R. M. Fishman, Working-class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, Cornell University Press, 1990. (3) For useful bibliography, see Sistema, Madrid, no 68-69, 1985. (4) A. Bonime-Blanc, Spain's Transition to Democracy, Westview, 1987. (5) J. J. Linz, |A Consolidated Democracy', no date, unpublished manuscript. (6) J. Story and J. Grugel, Spanish External Policies and the EC Presidency, Centre for Mediterranea Studies, University of Bristol, Occasional Paper no 2, 1991. (7) J. Higley and R. Gunther (eds), Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Souther Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1992. (8) V. Perez-Diaz, El retorno de la socieded civil (Instituto de Estudios Economicos, Madrid, 1987); Fishman, op. cit. (9) C. T. Powell, El piloto del cambio: El Rey, la monarquia y la transicion a la democracia, Planet 1991. (10) Perez-Diaz, op. cit.; J. Foweraker, Making Democracy in Spain, Cambridge University Press, 1989 (11) M. Cotta, |Elite Unification and Democratic Consolidation in Italy: A Historical Overivew', in Higley and Gunther (eds), op. cit. (12) G. Di Palma, |Parliaments, Consolidation, Institutionalization: A Minimalist View', in U. Liebe and M. Cotta (eds), Parliament and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe, Pinter, 1990. (13) Linz, op. cit. (14) G. Pridham (ed), Securing Democracy: Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe, Routledge, 1990. (15) H. J. Wiarda, The Transition to Democracy in Spain and Portugal, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC, 1989. (16) Linz, op. cit. (17) M. Burton, R. Gunther and J. Higley, |Introduction', in Gunther and Higley (eds), op. cit. p. 5 (18) J. M. Maravall and J. Santamaria, |Political Change in Spain and the Prospects for Democracy', G. O'Donnell, P. C. Schmitter and L. Whitehead (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, John Hopkins University Press, 1986. (19) P. del Castillo and G. Sani, |Las elecciones de 1986', in J. J. Linz and J. R. Montero (eds), C cambio: Electores y partido en la Espana de los anos ochenta, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, Madrid, 1986. (20) El Pais, Madrid, 17 February 1991. (21) J. Sinova and J. Tusell, El secuestro de la democracia, Plaza y Janes, 1990.

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Title Annotation:	Building Democracy
Author:	Gillespie, Richard
Publication:	Parliamentary Affairs
Date:	Oct 1, 1993
Words:	6957
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Topics:	Democracy Spain Elite (Social sciences) Spain Political reform Spain