Current Issue

Jump to:
Introduction
Letter
Reviews
Articles
Abstracts

Announcements
Call for papers #37

Gunther, Richard, Jose Ramon Montero and Joan Botella. Democracy in Modern Spain New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2004, 478 pages.

The Spanish transition to democracy in the 1970s has largely been the terrain of political scientists, in particular "transitologists" testing broader explanatory models in a comparative framework. Within this genre, there is no question that Democracy in Spain is a superb addition. While it does not offer a dramatic new interpretation of the factors that went into what the authors agree was a successful transition, the ambitious scope of its synthetic reach defines it as the culmination of the political science scholarship of the last twenty-five years. This scope is reflected both in its attention to the linked but separate issues of transition and consolidation of democracy, as well as in its attempt to present a "multi-dimensional" analysis that transcends competing "structural" and "elite crafting" theoretical frameworks.
The central question the book addresses is why Spain was finally able to consolidate a democratic regime after the 1970s. To answer this question, the authors return to two earlier failed attempts, the Restoration (1874-1923) and the Second Republic (1931-1936), to highlight the factors that prevented successful consolidation in the past. Their analysis considers all the familiar variables that have been raised, from economic backwardness, to religious, geographic and class cleavages, to the behavior of political parties and the underlying "political culture." True to their multidimensional claims, the authors assert that changes in all of these areas contributed to the recent successful consolidation, in contrast to the "modernization model" that pinpoints structural change or the "rational choice" model that privileges elite behavior. While acknowledging elements of both of these models, the authors weigh in on the side of a modified "elite crafting" framework. "In our view, socioeconomic change merely established the parameters within which political and social elites interacted in transforming the political system." (12) At the same time, they qualify that elites "do not act in a social or political vacuum" (82) and that the "continuing dialogue of politics" (152) involves the interaction between elite behavior and mass opinion.
The book's analysis is structured around making the case for this modified "crafting" model. Thus, while "modernization" gets credit for undermining the economic and social bases of the cacique system and softening the massive inequality that sustained polarized ideological positions, the authors work to demonstrate that this process produced no automatic consensus on political values. In fact, they use opinion data to argue that the old cleavages were alive and well in the 1970s and that serious disagreement on fundamental issues regarding the nature of a democratic state could just as easily have ended in another failed transition. Thus, the country was deeply divided about a republic vs. a monarchy, about the role of the church, and about a centralized vs. a federalized state, while early voting patterns revealed the survival of class cleavages. In contrast to those who have tried to claim continuity with older democratic traditions, the authors emphasize the discontinuity of Spain's political history, which created no traditions on which a majority could agree. If political elites had truly represented the opinions of their divided constituents, the authors boldly assert, the transition would have been no more successful than in the 1930s (104). Instead, the elites were able to transcend the lack of consensus on values and establish a consensus on procedure that was institutionalized through such mechanisms as the Constitution, the electoral system, and the autonomous governments.
Crucial to this elite consensus was the "tactical demobilization" (81) of popular participation, symbolized by the closed door negotiations on the Constitution, but also by the restructuring of "successful" parties like the PSOE and the PP, which made them strong governing parties but limited internal participation. The authors clearly side with those who have argued that such demobilization was necessary to the success of the transition, and in fact they define high mobilization as one of the factors that characterizes what they call the failed transition in the Basque Country. At the same time, they admit that the elite-driven transition may have contributed to what they define as one of the major weaknesses of Spain's consolidated democracy: a feeble civil society and a low level of interest in politics. They don't really take a position in the debate over whether this weak civil society owes more to the nature of the transition or to the legacy of Francoist demobilization and the political turmoil of the previous period, but they are more concerned with stability than participation, in any case. Given the choice between the apathy of today's democracy and the high mobilization of the Second Republic, they argue, this is a better democracy (197).
For the authors, the only weakness that could still threaten the consolidation of Spain's democracy is the Basque issue and its links to the unresolved inconsistencies of the autonomous federal system. In fact, the authors argue that the transition in the Basque Country has to be treated separately from the general transition, and that there, a process of high mobilization, polarization, and violence diverged from the demobilization, moderation, and consensus that was the norm on the national level. Furthermore, the nature of the Basque transition created a political culture of violence that continues to be exploited by the regional parties, especially the PNV, which the authors label "semi-loyal" to the democratic process. The special claims of "historical" regions have shaped the uneven process of devolution, and the book is one of the first to analyze not only the complex structure of the Estado de las Autonomias but also the impact of twenty years of decentralization, which is dramatic enough to be defined as Spain's second political transition. In more general terms, it is the book's analysis of what has happened since 1978, not only to the autonomous governments, but to the party system, to the old cleavages, to "political culture," and to public policy that brings together a lot of material previously published only in articles in specialized journals.
The book is less useful, I think, in its treatment of the Restoration and the Second Republic, where it relies on a few scholarly syntheses from the 1970s that exaggerate the late-nineteenth/ early-twentieth-century distinction between a backward Spain and a monolithic ideal model of a modern, democratic Europe that did not exist before the Second World War. The assumption that "Spain was different" has been modified in all sorts of ways in more recent scholarship (on both Europe and Spain) that is simply not acknowledged. More seriously, the authors' framework for evaluating historical change will leave social historians dissatisfied with the paucity of actors on the stage. Even within their multidimensional model that accounts for structural change and elite behavior, there is no room for protagonism on the part of the masses. The Spanish people have "opinions" while elites act, and those opinions seem to change as a reductive result of "modernization." Thus, changes in "civil society" appear as a seamless extension of socioeconomic change, not as a result of citizen "action." In this, as in other ways, the book represents the culmination of a genre of transition scholarship which has many virtues but which reinforces a traditional master narrative of politics that social historians have been challenging for the last several decades. For the Spanish transition, that social history has yet to be written.

Pamela Radcliff
University of California, San Diego