ABSTRACT
The chapter, based on an ongoing research project, proposes to revisit the history of Spanish democracy in the twentieth century. This is a new reading that, without diminishing the disaster of the Civil War, points to the possibility of drawing lines of continuity between the three moments recognized as democratic in Spain’s contemporary history: the democratic Sexenio (1868–1874), the Second Republic (1931–1939) and the democratic transition after Franco’s dictatorship (1975–1982). The authors point out that the local political culture studied for nineteenth-century Spain was also present in the twentieth century and that far from being an uncomfortable vestige of the past, understood as a delaying factor in modernization, it was a characteristic of the democratization process that took place in Spain. A process on a local scale that helps us to understand why formal democracy succeeded both in the 1930s and in the 1970s. Finally, the authors make a theoretical proposal to contribute to identifying the episodes of democratization that can be studied today in order to understand the process of political change.
