ABSTRACT
The Spanish transition to democracy has been called “the very model of the modern elite settlement” (Gunther 1992) and a “paradigmatic case” of a pacted democratic transition (Linz and Stepan 1996, 87).1 Dialogue and compromise amongst and between reformers within the incumbent authoritarian regime and the opposition characterized the transition process. Compliance was sought amongst the Francoist political class to allow democratization to go forward, symbolized by the Francoist parliament’s decision to vote itself out of power with the approval of Adolfo Suárez’s Law for Political Reform, the head of government’s framework for the political transition. Once the Spanish public approved the Law for Political Reform in a national referendum on December 15, 1976, dialogue began in earnest between the Suárez government and the opposition to the authoritarian regime, which culminated in the founding democratic parliamentary elections of June 1977.
