BEFORE THE PACT: THE EARLY STAGE OF THE SPANISH TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY
BEFORE THE PACT: THE EARLY STAGE OF THE SPANISH TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY

Summary/Abstract: The Spanish transition to democracy is a landmark in the contemporary field of democratisation studies, and is widely seen as a typical case of negotiated transition. An impressive amount of literature has assessed the strategies and behaviour of the main actors during the transition, as well as during the subsequent process of democratic consolidation. The pact, as a mode of transition, has been extensively linked to the success of the democratisation process. Starting from a temporal segmentation of the transition process, this article suggests that post- Francoist reformers exerted a relatively high degree of control over the content and speed of political change during the early stage of the transition; only after the first free elections was the opposition able to determine the initiation of formal negotiations.

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