ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role and functions of political parties and the party systems of Spain and Portugal, and focuses on the transition from the authoritarian politics of the Franco and Salazar eras to the more open and democratic period of the present. The origins of the Spanish and Portuguese parties and party systems go back into the nineteenth century. Some would trace their origins even earlier, to the eighteenth century and the emergence of the “two Spains” and “two Portugals” phenomena. With social and economic change in Spain and Portugal, principally the development of sizable middle-class and trade-union groups, toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, new political associations emerged. The political parties and the “party systems” that have recently emerged in Spain and Portugal are fragile and only weakly institutionalized. The result, in both Spain and Portugal, is a dual system of political power and authority.
