ABSTRACT
Spain has moved from a highly centralized and authoritarian political regime in which there were only two levels of government to a democratic, three-level political system. Many changes in policy governance have taken place since 1978, including those resulting from Spain's membership in the European Union (EU), and there is no doubt that all have been influential. This chapter focuses on the process of institutional design by which an intermediate level of government was created in Spain. In the 1978 Constitution, Spain is explicitly characterized as a state of self-governing communities in order to demarcate it from both centralized and federal systems. In Spain there are 8.098 municipalities, and 53 provincial governments. Spain has had, it must be acknowledged, a comparative advantage if people think about Transition in Eastern Europe. This is because Spain's economy was organized under market rules when the democratic transition occurred and multilevel governance was introduced.
