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In recent years the debate on territorial organization of political power in Spain has become particularly intense. The failure of the political process of reform of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia and the current debate over the right to decide, or the problems associated with the Basque context, raise many questions about the future. This paper attempts to relate some concepts of contemporary political theory with that scenario, focusing on issues such as constitutional recognition of the right of secession or proposals for multinational federalism. To do this, we review different theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of multinationality and present some considerations on the possible reform and/or reinterpretation of Spanish law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The variance in electoral magnitude and in district malapportionment is relevant to understand the political consequences of the spanish electoral system. This paper proposes a threefold classification of districts into subsystems and validates it by its diverging results in fractionalization and proportionality. The inequality of electoral magnitudes places a special overrepresentation bonus on certain parties; and the same happens with malapportionment. Both things accumulate into a geographical electoral price which results in a conservative bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse the influence of the 2008 and 2011 Spanish electoral campaigns on political efficacy. For this purpose, we employ statistical analysis with poll data. The results support the hypothesis that electoral campaigns can have a positive impact on political efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes over, from an empirical perspective, one of the classic concerns of normative theories of democracy: political community size and citizen participation. Although it focuses on voter turnout, this paper makes a simple question: why and how the political body size can influence the political behaviour of its residents. For this purpose, we examine, from an aggregate approach, the relationship between "size" and turnout in different types of elections in Andalusia, in the period 1999-2011. Our ecological analysis of participation, by using multi-regression techniques, shows that population size is the main "civic" characteristic of localities. However, other characteristics of local contexts, such as income and subsidized agrarian population, are positively related to participation. Our results suggest that individual theories of voting behaviour should also take into account the contextual factor when offering their conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a new electoral system for the Spanish Congress. This new system does not require any changes in the current Spanish Constitution. The main objectives are representativity, governability and equity. For this purpose, political party seats are allocated in several stages, and a biproportional allotment is applied to determine how many seats are allocated to each party in each constituency. The possibilities of forming stable governments, with the proposed electoral systems, are similar to those obtained with the present electoral system; however with the proposed system the results are more equal in the sense that two parties with a similar number of votes would obtain the same or nearly the same number of seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]