"This book delves into the conceptual changes produced by the Spanish constitutional debate held between 27 August and 9 December 1931. Taking place at the beginning of Spain's Second Republic, those parliamentary deliberations brought about significant novelties in the political vocabulary. Concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, reform, revolution, and freedom, among others, were re-signified. This study investigates the conceptual contributions made by Spanish MPs in the course of the constitutional debate of 1931 by assuming, as a research approach, an interdisciplinary stance combining conceptual history, political theory, and parliamentary constitutional history. By doing so, it selects five determining issues: the pervasive discussion about two competing meanings of a democratic state; the rhetorical uses of reform and revolution; conceptual controversies about religious freedom; the disputed idea of property rights; and the functions of parliament and the president of the republic in a semi-presidential regime. The constitutional debate was largely inspired by interwar European constitutionalism which constituent representatives used to update the Spanish constitutional tradition. With that goal in mind, this book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students and scholars working in the fields of conceptual history, political philosophy, parliamentary history, European political history, and European constitutionalism"--

Despite the widespread attention attracted by Spain's remarkable transition from General Franco's repressive dictatorship to a dynamic democracy, this is the first comprehensive study in English of the new Spanish political system. The book introduces the main institutions and features of the contemporary Spanish state and assesses to what extent these still bear the imprint of the Francoist legacy. Despite some remaining obstacles and difficulties, Paul Heywood argues, the country is now decisively in the political mainstream of the new Europe.

This book addresses the changing relationships among political participation, political representation, and popular mobilization in Spain from the 1766 protest in Madrid against the early Bourbon reforms until the citizen revolution of 1868 that first introduced universal suffrage and led to the ousting of the monarchy. Popular Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain shows that a notion of the “crowd” internally dividing the concept of “people” existed before the advent of Liberalism, allowing for the enduring subordination of popular participation to representation in politics. In its wider European and colonial American context, the study analyzes semantic changes in a range of cultural spheres, from parliamentary debate to historical narrative and aesthetics. It shows how Liberalism had trouble reproducing the legitimacy of limited suffrage and traces the evolution of an imagination on democracy that would allow for the reconfiguration of an all-encompassing image of the people eventually overcoming representative government. “Focused on the nation and identities, Spanish historiography had a pending debt with that other historical subject of modernity, the people. With this book, Pablo Sánchez León starts cancelling the debt with an innovative methodology combining conceptual history with social and political history. Brilliantly, this books also proposes a novel chronology for modern history and renewed categories of analysis. In many senses, this is an extraordinarily renovating senior work.” —José María Portillo Valdés, University of the Basque Country, Spain “This book by Pablo Sánchez León is an original and detailed study of one of the essential components of modernity, the relation between the concepts of plebe and pueblo. The author shows that plebe and people were shaped in a process of mutual differentiation and how the enduring tension between them deeply marked out the evolution of Spanish politics from the end of the Old Regime and throughout the 19th century. As the author brilliantly argues, such tension is tightly imbricated with the enduring dilemma between representation and participation underlying modern political systems. Through a historical analysis of the influence of people and plebe over Spanish, the book makes clear the degree to which the power of language contributes to shape political actors and institutional frames.” —Miguel Ángel Cabrera — Professor, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain “Most accounts of Spain’s transition to modern democracy begin with the popular uprising against the French invasion in 1808, the creation of a national parliament and the promulgation of an advanced Liberal constitution in 1812. Pablo Sánchez León begins the story half a century earlier in the mass street protests in Madrid and other cities in 1766 sparked by Charles III’s sweeping reform programme. Sánchez León focuses unrepentantly on plebeian groups and crowd action – how they are described and conceived by contemporaries – as a key to understanding Spain’s precocious and troubled passage from absolutism to the promulgation of universal male suffrage in September 1868. This audacious and highly original interpretation will surely strike a chord with students of modern Spain.” —Guy Thomson, University of Warwick, UK “This is a book for exploring (from current needs) the history of political participation in Spanish society in order to rethink the very notion of modern citizenship.” —María Sierra, University of Seville, Spain “Motivated by the current crisis in political representation in parliamentary democracies, this work by Pablo Sánchez León departs from the process of construction of modern citizenship. Representation, participation and mobilization are put into play as an interactive triad whose dynamics and changing conceptualization have the key to the social, political and cultural changes between the Old Regime and the early establishment of democracy in 1868. The “They do not represent us!” and other current claims for deliberative democracy provide the guiding thread for a demanding research on the tension between representation and participation shaping the period 1766-1868. The work reflects on the relevance of popular participation and, in presenting the modern history of Spain as singular and relevant on its own, provides an account of the building of modern citizenship. —Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain This exciting book is both topical and historiographically valuable. It offers a fresh perspective on current debates about the limits of representation and the pros and cons of participation; it makes Spanish political culture in the age of revolutions accessible to anglophone readers, and it engagingly illustrates one way of doing the ‘history of concepts’. Recommended on all three counts. Joanna Innes, Oxford University

This book delves into the conceptual changes produced by the Spanish constitutional debate held between 27 August and 9 December 1931. Taking place at the beginning of Spain’s Second Republic, those parliamentary deliberations brought about significant novelties in the political vocabulary. Concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, reform, revolution, and freedom, among others, were re-signified. This study investigates the conceptual contributions made by Spanish MPs in the course of the constitutional debate of 1931 by assuming, as a research approach, an interdisciplinary stance combining conceptual history, political theory, and parliamentary constitutional history. By doing so, it selects five determining issues: the pervasive discussion about two competing meanings of a democratic state; the rhetorical uses of reform and revolution; conceptual controversies about religious freedom; the disputed idea of property rights; and the functions of parliament and the president of the republic in a semi-presidential regime. The constitutional debate was largely inspired by interwar European constitutionalism which constituent representatives used to update the Spanish constitutional tradition. With that goal in mind, this book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students and scholars working in the fields of conceptual history, political philosophy, parliamentary history, European political history, and European constitutionalism. Licence line: The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Most accounts on the Spanish transition to democracy of the late 1970s are based on a false dilemma. Its simplest formulation could be: was it the pressure from below, i.e. the organized working classes, students and neighbors associations that triggered political change; or was the elite settlement reached by the regime soft-liners and the moderate sectors of the democratic opposition that established it? This new and innovative volume appraises the movement towards a more democratic Spain from a variety of important perspectives; the collection of essays sheds light on the wide range of crucial processes, institutions and actors involved in the political transformation that operated in the Spanish instance of the Third Wave of democratization. By making comparisons to other democratic transitions, synthesizing the ideas of several leading Spanish History scholars, as well as incorporating new voices involved in creating the directions of research to come, The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition offers a thorough and vital look at this key period in contemporary Spanish history, taking stock of critical lessons to be gleaned from the Spanish Transition, and pointing the way toward its future as a democratic nation.

Since the death of Franco in 1975, Spain has made a successful transition to democracy. This book looks at what that transition has meant for the Spanish people. Drawing on national surveys taken in 1978, 1980, 1984, and 1990, the authors explore three questions: What is the basis of the new regime's political legitimacy? How did Spanish democracy move from the conservative center-right coalition that engineered the transition to the socialist government that consolidated it? And why is political participation so low among Spaniards? The answers to the first two questions highlight the ambiguity built into the political contrast with the Franco regime and a certain appreciation of the material accomplishments of authoritarianism, the pivotal role of the king in opting for democracy while symbolically spanning traditional and modernizing forces, and finally a movement from foundational issues to economic and social concerns. In response to the third question, the authors illuminate the participatory shortfall in Spanish politics by comparing Spain with Brazil and Korea, two post-authoritarian societies where political involvement is much higher. They consider long-term structural factors as well as short-term strategic actions that have contributed to low civic engagement.