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The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the 'age of austerity' that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as 'pragmatic prefigurativism'. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a 'left convergence' of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tele-revista was a biweekly Swiss television broadcast for Spanish immigrants living in Switzerland. It dealt with labour and migration-related issues in Switzerland, information about Spanish cultural manifestations, political rights and interviews with committed immigrants and key figures of Spanish politics in transit on Swiss soil. First aired in 1973, in the final years of General Franco's authoritarian regime, the TV magazine, initially broadcast on the three Swiss TV channels, is an unique source of the Spanish transition to democracy, seen through the eyes of Swiss TV-makers with the collaboration of some Spanish journalists. Tele-revista was aimed for a better integration of Spaniards within Swiss society, who were considered worse integrated than the Italians. The paper pursues to present a general portrayal of the broadcast with a special attention to the years of the Spanish transition to democracy by means of focussing on the information about social, cultural and political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of populist parties across Europe is shaking the foundations of Representative Democracy, of which Spain is a particular example: decades of bipartisanship have been broken amidst a territorial, economic and social crisis, with new parties rising on the left and the right side of the spectrum. The aim of this paper is to analyse the Spanish political scenario and find which (if any) parties classify as populist and what are the other ideological traits of this (or these) parties, by means of both content and discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to resolve one of the key tensions in the literature on populism: whether populism is a threat to democracy or the best means of renewing and deepening democracy. The author argues that, rather than defining populism in terms of certain definite outcomes, we should view populism as a symptom of crisis, and one capable of producing a variety of possible effects, some positive and some negative. The argument is pursued in terms of highlighting certain shortcomings in terms of the dominant approaches to the issue, and also through exploring recent Spanish politics, which has seen an increase in various kinds of populist parties and movements. The renewal of democracy in Spain is offered as an example of how populist initiatives can have beneficial outcomes, as well as detrimental ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the survival of a form of historical memory in modern Spain that dates back to the nineteenth century. The prevailing form of Spanish national identity at that time was completely dependent on Catholicism; the medieval Iberian past was understood as a struggle of national liberation against invading Muslims, culminating in a final Christian victory in 1492. This approach generated an exclusionary vision of al-Andalus as alien to Spanish identity, expressed through the notion of "Reconquista," which reached its peak during the Franco dictatorship, the heyday of National Catholic ideology. Although the idea of Reconquista lost its historiographical hegemony after the arrival of democracy in 1978, recent events show that, despite its strong ideological connotations, or perhaps because of them, it remains the key concept in defining the medieval period within the most conservative sectors of academia, politics, and the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Podemos, a political force that is ideologically and organizationally new, has shaken Spanish politics. Only three years old, and taking advantage of the dual economic and political crisis, it has managed to put an end to the two-party political system, while becoming a source of inspiration (or grounds for concern) outside of Spain. The aim of this paper is to analyse the origins of Podemos, its main characteristics (its ideology, its organization and its social bases) and the impact it has had on Spanish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hypothesis for understanding democratic stability based on the distinction between politicized and meritocratic bureaucracies. We argue that in a politicized administration, the professional careers of large numbers of government officials depend directly upon which party wins the elections. This increases the likelihood that the government will take opportunistic actions aimed at surviving in office at any cost; that is, benefiting core supporters at the expense of other groups. In turn, this may foster pre-emptive actions from the opposition, such as military coups. Conversely, in democracies with meritocratic administrations, incumbents are credibly constrained from undertaking partial policies because their hands are tied in terms of managing the staff policy of the state apparatus. Consequently, countries with meritocratic bureaucracies have greater prospects for democratic stability. Empirically, we illustrate the mechanisms with two well-documented cases of democratic transitions that enshrined a politicized administration – Spain (1876–1936) and Venezuela (1958–1998) – and one transition that kept a meritocratic bureaucracy, Spain (1975–). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]