The Costs of the Reform: Analyzing the Spanish Transition to Democracy from an Elite Perspective

The Spanish transition to democracy is considered the paradigmatic case of successful democratization from above, in which the political elites lead a process that converted an authoritarian state into a liberal democracy. Despite the controversies opened in the last years regarding the legacy of the Spanish transition for the continuity of many Francoist political and economic elites during the democratic period, there has been no systematic study on to what extent Francoist elites remained in power nor on the factors explaining elite reproducibility under distinct regimes. In this paper, we present a new dataset to measure the renewal of elites in the Spanish transition called the "Spanish Transition dataset." Our dataset contains more than 500 profiles of the main economic and political figures of late Francoism as well as the leaders of the main opposition forces and those leading the Transition to democracy. By studying the interaction of cultural, economic, and social capital variables using multiple descriptive methods (correspondence analysis, cluster analysis, and social network analysis), sequence and regression analyses, we show which families of Francoism were more likely to remain in prestigious positions and to what extent the Spanish democracy changed of hands after democratization.