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The Spanish Constitutional Court has occupied a central position in the Spanish political system since the Transition. Its decisions have completed, and still complete, the articles of the 1978 Constitution. Nevertheless, despite its intense activity in civil and administrative issues, this institution has progressively lost support among public opinion. To a large extent, the Court is now considered a politicized organization serving the interests of Conservative political forces. The growing intrusion of the judiciary in Spanish politics has increased this feeling. How to explain this biased viewpoint? In this paper, we argue that there are two reasons for this declining trust. On the one hand, the Court is the collateral victim of party politics which forced it to take sides. The Court is subject to a process of polarization affecting the whole Spanish political system. On the other hand, the Court has interfered regularly in the political debate by imposing its view, up to blocking parliamentary debates in late 2022. This double process is analysed from a new institutional perspective. We identified four critical junctures involving the Court and political parties, namely the delaying of decisions, the veto on governmental policy, the recusing of justices, and the blockade of appointments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain why some central governments accept to hold independence referendums while others refuse to do so. For this purpose, this investigation assesses a series of seven hypotheses on 131 international cases of secession consultations from 1944 to 2021 extracted from an updated version of the Contested sovereignty dataset. The results of the logistic regression model identify four relevant variables. In the first place, the competition/proximity model and the time variable explain the support brought by central governments for the organisation of self-determination referendums. Additionally, the study shows that the quality of democracy influences the decision to allow minorities to hold independence consultations. Finally, and with a lower level of significance, it is also argued that periods of previous violence incite host state authorities to agree to hold self-determination referendums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study consisted in undertaking a bibliographical search within the Web of Science Core Collection from January 1900 to December 2020. A total of 637 publications were identified and divided into 9 sections tackling successively the relevance of independence referendums, the biased authorship, the definition of the phenomenon, the technical features of referendums, the elaboration of comparative datasets, the legitimacy of these consultations, the drivers leading to the organisation of independence referendums, the impact of referendums on settling ethnic violence and their capacity to favour state recognition. We affirm that those publications have advanced our knowledge about independence referendums. We also stress the persistence of a high fragmentation of authorship and approaches limiting the adoption of a common vocabulary, validation methods and consistent datasets allowing the accumulation and replication of analyses for establishing robust theories. In conclusion, we indicate some theoretical blind spots which could constitute a future research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence and influence of peripheral elites in national political institutions is frequently handled by the press. But, oddly enough, the lack of a comprehensive vision of this issue tends to feed flashy titles alerting about the influence of some territorial groups in central institutions such as the "Scottish Raj," the "Tartan mafia," or the "Cosa Scotia" in London. This article aims to provide a general theoretical framework able to orient those fragmented researches. This literature review was led from May 2018 to June 2020. It presents those results in six sections. The ways in which peripheral elites get access to central institutions are analyzed in the first section. In the second section, we introduce the literature about the presence of peripheral elites in the state apparatus, before stressing the different networks representing the interests of peripheries in the city capitals in section three. Fourth, this article points out the various career orientations of peripheral elected officials. This leads us to question their policy influence in different fields. Lastly, a short section tackles the phobias provoked by the rise of peripheral elites occupying central political positions, before proposing a general framework for orienting future research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on Catalan cabinet ministers in democratic Spain with a view to understanding what function they perform in the central government: regional ambassador or state agent? To this end, this analysis draws on a sub-dataset comprised of 22 Catalan cabinet ministers taken from a general pool of 220 cabinet ministers and 371 ministerial appointments from 1977 to 2021. Our findings demonstrate, first, that no Catalan cabinet minister has ever reached the position of Prime Minister and Catalans constitute a kind of ministerial "middle class" occupying intermediate positions in the cabinet. Second, the examination of career paths and publications of Catalan ministers shows that their role varied according to circumstances. Third, in this article we argue that those variations can be best interpreted as a delegation between principal and agent relying on two main variables, namely the type of party they belong to in Catalonia and the parliamentarian majority sustaining the party controlling the Spanish cabinet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although frequently depicted as a purely majoritarian system, the recruitment of executive elites in Spain is said to incorporate unofficial 'quotas' allowing the representation of territorial minorities. But does the selection of cabinet ministers in Spain produce consociational-like effects? This study aims to answer this question through a statistical model based on an original dataset of 223 cabinet ministers and 375 appointments from 1977 to 2021. It is demonstrated that territorial selection depends on three main variables: the regional educational level, the marginalization of plurilingual autonomous communities and the exclusion of ethno-regionalist parties at the Congress. Consequently, our main hypothesis must be rejected. The main reason explaining the lack of the consociational ministerial recruitment phenomenon in Spain seems to rely on the behaviour of ethno-regionalist parties at the Congress. To avoid potential electoral losses, these actors have developed a strong preference for national policies favouring their own constituencies, rather than for ministerial positions within the Spanish cabinet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Much has been said about recurrent conflicts between the government of Spain and the executives of autonomous communities. Drawing on mixed methods, this research explores some of the deterrents of the centre–periphery quarrels in Spain. This investigation operationalizes intergovernmental tensions through a quantitative data set based on several litigations between regional and central executives in Spain before the Constitutional Court from 1980 to 2014, as well as a series of 30 in-depth interviews. It demonstrates that the organization of sectorial conferences, the signing of cooperation agreements and periods of party congruence help prevent the rise of intergovernmental contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a framework for studying the territorial political capacity of regions in Europe. The proposed framework identifies three main dimensions of territorial political capacity. Mainly material indicators include institutions and institutional resources. Mixed material and constructed indicators centre on causal mechanisms of party and leadership capacity. Mainly constructed indicators are drawn from territorial praxis. Understanding a region requires combining different levels of analysis and distinctive ways of knowing; broad-based (quasi-statistical) variables facilitate comparison, while the focus on resilience and capacity requires primary data collection, drilling down into the practices of comparable panels of actors. This article discusses this framework in relation to four European regions that were the object of empirical investigation in 2012–2014: namely Brittany (France), Andalusia (Spain), Wallonia (Belgium) and Wales (United Kingdom). It contributes to the conceptualization of comparative territorial capacity, in a manner distinct from, but largely consistent with the Regional Authority Index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on the variety of indexes of decentralization. The first section reviews and compares a dataset consisting of 25 decentralization indexes according to a series of items, namely: the definition of territorial autonomy, the kind of units of analysis, the number of cases, the nature of variables, the timescale, the measurement frequency, the scoring, the sources, the validity and reliability assessment and the transparency of the data production process. It concludes by stating that the Regional Authority Index and the Local Autonomy Index are the rankings which best comply with these quality standards. In the second section, these two indexes are introduced along with the Territorial Political Capacity framework. While the former can be considered as the current international standards in the field of decentralization indexes, the latter proposes alternative ways to understand decentralization through using mixed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]