The recent crisis between the central state and the Catalan government demonstrated the endurance of center-periphery tensions in Spain. A broad range of studies have pointed the institutional deficit of the Spanish polity as a major cause of this gap; nevertheless, none of them has intended to understand the roots of such a breach. This paper aims to go beyond those descriptive and partial approaches through a quantitative research on the drivers of intergovernmental crisis in Spain. Through the study of the Constitutional Court jurisprudence, a historical review of the relationship between the Spanish cabinet and the different autonomous communities' governments has been drawn. Then, a series of statistical tests were applied for identifying the political, economic and judicial drivers of such tensions.
