Safeguards or disturbing elements? The political factors that affect the de/centralization of the territorial power distribution: the case of the Spanish political system

Due to the economic crisis, held form 2008 on, the different federal Systems and decentralized ones had been rearranging themselves, in order to provide a better and more efficient way of working. In this sense, this paper analyzes the political elements that affect the decentralization and centralization of the political system. Moreover, focusing them on the changes that the system has held due to this finance recession. This research, according to the rational choice institutionalism assumes that territorial power share of a state is inherently unstable dependable on the political context. The territorial distribution of power that defines the level of de/centralization changes depending on the relevance of some structural and contextual elements in a political context. Therefore, this contextual situations held for the last seven years, may have affected in the coordination and the degree of the decentralization in the Spanish political system. In this very same line, some research considered these elements as safeguards that ensure no separation or no complete centralization, joining equilibrium theory. According to this previous statements, this research aims at identifying what elements made mutate the Spanish territorial power distribution since the adoption of the constitution in 1978, focusing on: the electorate (public opinion and electoral behavior) the structural characteristics of the political system and contextual characteristics of the system. Even more, moving the main objective of this research into studying the effects that economic crisis made on the Spanish system and pointing out the main conclusions obtained from the three issues previously discussed.