Democratic Innovations and New Forms of Policy Development within Spanish Political Parties

Since the last Great Recession, Spanish political parties have fostered democratic innovations in order to straighten the widespread mistrust and appalling image extended among their fellow citizens. In this respect, they have followed similar paths to the ones previously carried out by other Western parties. So far, the scholarly and media attention has mostly focused on the introduction of party primaries for the selection of candidates and party leaders as one of the main axis of political innovation. However, very little is known on other recent forms of democratic innovation as the ones developed by other Western parties in terms of policy development and decision making. That is why the first aim of this paper is to describe the main democratic improvements undertaken by the Spanish political parties on this area. In this respect, the paper will focus on two sets of practices. The first ones are those intended to extend deliberation to the whole party. The second set of innovations have to do with the introduction of internal referenda, occasionally mixed with some forms of internal deliberation procedures. The second aim of the paper is to qualitatively assess the main consequences of these innovations, as well as the relevance played by other contextual or organizational factors such as the role of the ICTs, or the control exerted by the party leadership. In this respect, the main hypothesis will be that those deliberations or decision-making processes tightly controlled by the party leader will led to less acute but more continued practices. To do so the paper will analyse several practices both from the main Spanish State-Wide parties such as the PSOE, IU or Podemos, and also form other minor and regionalist parties such between 2010 and 2018.