Another chapter from democracy’s secret history: A research program on some small spanish towns

Abstract

It is common to identify democracy with a form of organization of national states and to study democratization primarily at the national level. But in the early twenty-first century, questions are being raised about a variety of geographic scales, from transnational and global processes to sites much smaller than national states. We describe here a program of research into the relationship of local struggles for democracy and national processes in Spain over an extended period of time. Apart from its well-known democratic transition beginning in the mid-1970s Spain has not garnered much attention from students of democratization and within Spain rural Andalusia has not seemed in the forefront of democratization at any time. We are assembling data on local social movements and local political life for two contrasting small Andalusian towns and their surrounding countryside. Preliminary results suggest that these apparently unlikely places have been sites of significant movements for democracy and that there is much to learn about the history of democracy generally from the study of such sites. We describe here the kinds of data we have been assembling and present a few preliminary results.

Citation

Markoff, J. and Herrera, A. (2014), "Another chapter from democracy’s secret history: A research program on some small spanish towns", Voices of Globalization (Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 31-49. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-9935(2013)0000021004