In movement: New players in the construction of democracy in Spain, 1962–1977

Specialised literature on democratisation has generally presented the Spanish case as the model of an elite-led political settlement. This approach forms the basis of the most widespread interpretation of Spain's transition to democracy as a work of top-down political engineering. However, this scholarship fails to pay sufficient attention to the capacity for agency of civil society and both “old” and “new” social movements. In fact, although there is no doubt that democracy arrived in Spain by means of a negotiated transition, it must not be forgotten that the pacts among elites were influenced, as is demonstrated here, by relentless social pressure among highly organised collective actors, including the Communist Party. This paper shows that protests by this organisation and other collective actors in the most socioeconomically underdeveloped provinces of Spain, most of which have been ignored by the most influential scholarship on the transition, were vitally important in the negotiated path to democracy. As such, it investigates the relationship between social unrest and political change through the study of provinces which, a priori, were considered to be socially and politically inactive. This analysis of popular mobilisation in poor and politically marginalised provinces enables a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamics from below, which were fundamental in Spain's transition process.