ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at analyzing the choice of an entirely new electoral system in Spain during its transition process to democracy. Its origins lie in the mid-1970s, after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, when a handful of politicians belonging to the moderate cohorts of the authoritarian regime began drafting electoral rules that they hoped would be applied in a near future. These politicians had no direct experience in the complexities of either electoral systems or competitive democratic elections. The Francoist regime had lasted nearly forty years by then, and the previous democratic election were held in February 1936, one of the last democratic expressions of the ill-fated Second Republic before its collapse and the outbreak of the Civil War.
