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Having experienced a late institutionalisation as an academic discipline in the 1990s, during this century the political science community in Spain has struggled to converge with other fully established counterparts in Western Europe. In this article, we analyse and evaluate how successful these efforts have been concerning internationalisation. The article sheds light on the factors that explain this development. Using data from PhD dissertations defended since 1990 and articles published on SSCI journals since 1985, we demonstrate that the institutional reforms affecting higher education in Spain during the early 2000s, and the austerity measures introduced in the first part of the 2010s to address the economic crisis, together with the evolution of the particular ecology of the discipline, introduced greater competition into the Spanish political science academic market. This, in turn, triggered internationalisation of political scientists in Spain, particularly among the younger cohorts.

This chapter analyses the presence of non-political ministers in the Spanish cabinet in the democratic period since 1977, where one out of five ministers did not belong to the ruling party at the time of her appointment and one out of three can be considered as a non-political minister. By observing the selection and deselection of these individuals, it shows the cabinet dynamic behind the ministerial appointments and the differences between the more political type of ministers and those coming from outside political pathways. Despite some outstanding exceptions, non-political ministers are often recruited from outside the parliament and have fewer chances to develop a relevant ministerial career, staying in the cabinet shorter than political ministers. Similarly, they are more likely to leave the cabinet due to a general reshuffle or to an electoral defeat than to intra-cabinet conflicts or problems arising with parties. In the end, the significant amount of non-political ministers reflect the strong ‘presidential’ tendency of Spanish politics, with the predominance of the prime minister in and out of the cabinet, and the influence of the multi-level dynamics of the political system in the ministerial recruitment.

This article analyses the nature of Spanish political parties' attitudes towards the EU. Three main dimensions of the EU process and of its impact on the member states are focused upon: identity, representation and scope of governance. The analysis shows how European integration as an independent variable has impacted the party system. Then, how each political party has individually adapted to the new circumstances by changing its positions and policies since 1986, when Spain got the EEC membership. We maintain that, although the EU issue is not one of intense political contestation, and therefore it is not very salient for party competition, the historical cleavages of the Spanish party system still affect the party stance on the EU. On the whole, the European issue has been absorbed by the Spanish party system without any particular disruption, in a context of party wide-spread Europhilia.

Elite perceptions about Europe are very important in understanding the current trajectory of the European integration process, as well as the future perspectives for the continent. In this article, we present the main descriptive results of an empirical analysis looking at the attitudes of Spanish political and economic elites along the three dimensions of the IntUne project: representation, identity, and scope of governance. We examine the set of explanatory factors that may account for such attitudes. These factors are also tested through multivariate analyses. The 2007 IntUne project survey is used as the main database.