Democracy and Economic Crisis in Spain

To what extent is the current economic crisis threatening democracy in Southern Europe? Questions about the bleak relationships between economy and politics in the last ten years have been answered from many perspectives. Many of them lead to worrying conclusions about the negative impact of an increasing dissatisfaction generated by the negative performance of the political system on levels of support to democracy. This paper aims to examine the extent to which attitudes towards democracy are affected by the economic crisis in Spain, one of the countries most severely punished by the Great Recession. We challenge the predominant approach by firstly a longitudinal analysis of the relationships between the democratic regime and political discontent in times of economic bonanza and crisis; the data used will come from the Spanish Centre of Social Research (CIS) since the late 1970s. Secondly, we will discuss the determinants of support to democracy and political discontent, as well as political disaffection; in this case the cross-section data used will come from both the CIS and the European Social Survey (ESS). Our results give credence to the relative autonomy of support to democracy vis-à-vis political dissatisfaction and political disaffection, three crucial dimensions that should be treated as theoretically and empirically distinctive.