ABSTRACT
This article will examine how the right-wing governments of the Partido Popular (PP), which was in office from 1996 to 2004, dealt with one specific and highly sensitive policy area: political decentralization and the political role of decentralized entities within state-wide policymaking processes. This policy area is known in Spain as política autonómica, which refers to any policy choice that has to do with the institutional structure of the Autonomous Communities as entities of self-government, or with the political role of the Autonomous Communities within the state. That is, it refers to policies that shape the two main dimensions of any politically decentralized state: the self-government dimension and the shared-government dimension (Máiz et al., 2002, pp. 379–386).
