ABSTRACT
According to most witnesses and experts, political parties remained the unchallenged main agents in the establishment of democracy in Spain. Due to this widespread elitist viewpoint, social movements have usually been assigned a subordinated role in the process of transition from dictatorship, and consequently also in the analytical repertoires employed for interpreting the period (Share 1986; Colomer 1991; Gunther 1992). The consensus has been challenged in recent years, though. Emerging views underline the relevance of a brief but rather intensive cycle of protests between 1975 and 1979 that seems to have infl uenced short-term political events and even shaped some of the longer-term characters of political culture in contemporary Spain (Tarrow 1995); parallel to this trend is the growth of a literature focused on civil society that underlines the independent role of common people on the move in bringing democracy (Pérez Díaz 1993; Radcliff 2007).
