Spanish Central Government Research Articles

The adoption of dual Vocational Education and Training in Spain: Analysis of descentralised decision-making in educational policy transfer

This paper examines the adoption of dual VET in Spain as a process of educational policy transfer. Using Phillips and Ochs’ (2003, 2004) policy transfer spectrum and decision-making classification and Perry and Tor’s (2008) model of transfer forms, the study relies on semi-structured interviews with key decision-makers in the Spanish central government and the Autonomous Communities of the Basque Country and Andalusia. Findings indicate that EU diffusion activities facilitated adoption, involving first-order learning. Initially, adoption at the central level was uninformed, driven by quick-fix decisions, but later shifted to informed transfer through second- and third-order learning, enhancing realism. In Andalusia and the Basque Country, decision-making consistently adapted to the real context, progressing from second- to third-order learning. Ultimately, this analysis concludes that dual VET adoption at the central, Andalusian, and Basque levels falls between ‘negotiated under constraint’ and ‘borrowed purposefully’, though not at the same point.

Too Little, Too Late: the Catalan Debacle in Light of the Slovenian Attainment of Independence

The failed Catalan sovereignty process, launched in 2012 and then crushed by the intervention of the Spanish central government in 2017, relied to a certain extent on a discursive framework based on the evocation of previous secessionist experiences in Europe. Among these, the case of Slovenia (successfully completed in 1992) stood out. A close examination of these cases outlines the limitations of these analogies, notably through their differences in terms of political and social articulation and, in particular, the diverging success of external engagement. Beyond political and social articulation and the degree of economic development (heterogeneous aspects in many successful statehood processes), the comparison of these cases demonstrates that a sound internationalization strategy is essential for statehood attainment. The success of such a strategy does not solely depend on the secessionist actors’ ability to reach out to the relevant international players, but also on the latter’s readiness to provide necessary support. While the Slovenes managed to promptly engage with the rapid geopolitical changes in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the Catalan bid for secession found receptiveness only among marginal actors within major powers, all together unwilling to push for border changes of a state located in a sensitive area of the Euro-Atlantic security complex.

An Assessment Framework to Analyze Drought Management Plans: The Case of Spain

Droughts affect all socio-economic sectors and have negative impacts on the environment. Droughts are expected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, which makes their effective management a high priority for policy makers and water managers. Drought Management Plans (DMPs) are a key instrument to deal with droughts and help to prepare for them in a proactive way as a framework for coordinated action before and during droughts. The development of DMPs is still incipient worldwide and their assessment remains limited. In Spain, DMPs at a river basin level were first approved in 2007. Following the legal obligation set in Spanish law, those plans were revised after ten years and a new version was approved in 2018. A content analysis was developed for assessing the 2018 DMPs of eight river basins managed by their corresponding River Basin Authorities, which depend on the Spanish central government. The evaluation criteria were set using the extant scientific literature and official guidelines on drought preparedness and management. The analysis showed that some aspects of the DMPs are especially well-developed, e.g., the distinction between drought and water scarcity, the definition of thresholds to trigger different levels of drought and water scarcity alerts and actions for drought management and coordination. Other issues still need further improvement, especially those related to the analysis of drought impacts, the assessment of vulnerability and the ex-post evaluation of DPM performance.

Historyczna ewolucja independentyzmu katalońskiego. Formowanie się katalonizmu poprzez działalność regionalnych ruchów społecznych

The article contains an analysis of the historical development of Catalan nationalism, its evolution from the early Middle Ages to modern times. It points to the key role of social movements in the political process of protecting the Catalan identity from being degraded or completely eliminated by the Spanish central government. The depth of the region’s history points to several basic conclusions. Mainly, the image of Catalan separatism as a temporary “rush” of citizens, shaped by Catalan’s modern political elite to divert attention from the corruption scandals is untrue. The analysis of the rich history of Catalan political culture indicates that the phenomenon of Catalanism has become a constant.

Financial Reporting Quality and Online Disclosure Practices in Spanish Governmental Agencies

Good governance in the public sector implies high accountability levels. Accountability is a multidimensional concept that includes the quantity and reliability of disclosures as well as rendering accounts to the citizenry. Nowadays, good governance, accountability, and financial performance are key for the long-term sustainability of autonomous public sector organizations. The objective of this paper is to study how key governance features relate to the quantity and quality of the information disclosed. In particular, how the governing body, financial performance and organizational features relate to online transparency and financial reporting quality, as well as how these two accountability dimensions are related. To fulfill this objective, we have used the Structural Equation Modeling, Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) approach. The focus of our analyses is on Spanish central government agencies. The size of, and a greater presence of independent members in, the governing body are explanatory factors behind the quality of the financial reports. Our findings also show that the quality of the financial information is also affected by the pressure that Eurostat requirements -deficit limits- puts on public sector entities, which leads to the use of smoothing practices. Online disclosure practices are not explained by the features of the governing body, but by the size of the agencies and their financial results. The better the financial reporting quality, the higher the online disclosure levels.

The strategy of Spain in the United Nations

The article explores potential, resources and strategy of Spain in the United Nations from the moment when the resolution of the socalled Spanish question was adopted and Spain joined this influential intergovernmental international organization in 1955 to the present date. The author focuses on key problems which directly deal with national interests of Spain, including: a dispute with the United Kingdom about the ownership of Gibraltar, perennial problem of the Western (Spanish) Sahara conflict management, the initiative and the UN programme Alliance of Civilizations, co-sponsored by Spain, Kosovo issue and the danger of internationalization of the political and institutional conflict in Catalonia, efforts by the Spanish central government to achieve sustainable development goals. By analyzing foreign policy resources of Spain, initiatives and activities of the country in the United Nations and its various specialized agencies over the years using the UN information materials, the author suggests that successful democratic transition and the country’s accession to the European Economic Community in 1986 strengthened the profile of Spain in the United Nations. However, the political and institutional transformations in the European Union, creation of political union of the Member-States and establishment and development of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy mean that Spain may carry out its foreign policy in a ‘truncated’ form, taking into account the EU position as a special strategic partner of the UN and its expanded Observer status. The economic and foreign policy potential of this country weakening its competitive advantages under the influence of negative consequences of the global financial and economic crisis do not raise an issue about permanent membership of Spain in the UN Security Council. However, the ‘soft power’ resources based on its postimperial identity allow for a fairly high appreciation of possibilities of Spain with regard to monitoring, prevention and management of conflicts and crisis situations in developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, providing international assistance for development and facilitating intercultural dialogue of the Western and non-Western civilazations.

The strategy of Spain in the United Nations

The article explores potential, resources and strategy of Spain in the United Nations from the moment when the resolution of the socalled Spanish question was adopted and Spain joined this influential intergovernmental international organization in 1955 to the present date. The author focuses on key problems which directly deal with national interests of Spain, including: a dispute with the United Kingdom about the ownership of Gibraltar, perennial problem of the Western (Spanish) Sahara conflict management, the initiative and the UN programme Alliance of Civilizations, co-sponsored by Spain, Kosovo issue and the danger of internationalization of the political and institutional conflict in Catalonia, efforts by the Spanish central government to achieve sustainable development goals. By analyzing foreign policy resources of Spain, initiatives and activities of the country in the United Nations and its various specialized agencies over the years using the UN information materials, the author suggests that successful democratic transition and the country’s accession to the European Economic Community in 1986 strengthened the profile of Spain in the United Nations. However, the political and institutional transformations in the European Union, creation of political union of the Member-States and establishment and development of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy mean that Spain may carry out its foreign policy in a ‘truncated’ form, taking into account the EU position as a special strategic partner of the UN and its expanded Observer status. The economic and foreign policy potential of this country weakening its competitive advantages under the influence of negative consequences of the global financial and economic crisis do not raise an issue about permanent membership of Spain in the UN Security Council. However, the ‘soft power’ resources based on its postimperial identity allow for a fairly high appreciation of possibilities of Spain with regard to monitoring, prevention and management of conflicts and crisis situations in developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, providing international assistance for development and facilitating intercultural dialogue of the Western and non-Western civilazations.

Online transparency and corporate governance in Spanish governmental agencies

PurposeOnline transparency has become a tool to increase legitimacy and trust in governments. The purpose of this paper is to study the online transparency of Spanish Central Government agencies and analyze whether their corporate governance (CG) structures influence their online transparency.Design/methodology/approachThe information used for building an online transparency index and about the board of directors has been collected from the websites of the 168 agencies and from their statutes and activity reports. Ordinary least squares analysis is used. Based on a previous literature review and the requirements of the EU Directive and Spanish legislation, 108 items included in the websites have been analyzed.FindingsThe average information displayed through the website agencies is significantly less than the information considered as relevant in previous literature and in the Spanish legislation. The highest values are presented by the technical dimensions and the lowest by the organizational/political dimension. The presence of independent directors and women on the boards of directors are revealed as the most important explanatory factors of online transparency.Practical implicationsPractical implications to improve online transparency are related to the organizational/political dimension – including the positions and CVs of members of governing bodies, minutes, etc. and to the presence of independent directors and, to a lesser extent, of women, on the board of directors.Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper is the identification of some online transparency determinants in public entities under the same general legal framework. This is the first paper that analyzes the relationship between online transparency and CG in public agencies.

Catalonia: The Perils of Majoritarianism

Four explanations are commonly given for the unprecedented stalemate between regional secessionists in Catalonia and the Spanish central government in Madrid. None of these explanations, however, can provide a full and convincing account of how this political crisis reached its current proportions. Instead, this article identifies majoritarian democracy at both the central and regional levels as the main culprit. Institutionally, majoritarian democracy produces electoral winners who do not need to reach across the aisle. Culturally, the winner-takes-all mentality exacerbates polarization instead of helping to overcome it.

La subasta de medicamentos en Andalucía. Cuestiones controvertidas y perspectivas de futuro

El procedimiento de subasta de medicamentos establecido en la Comunidad Autónoma de Andalucía en el año 2011 como medida de ahorro del gasto farmacéutico ha sido duramente criticado tanto por el Gobierno de la nación que ha interpuestos varios recursos ante el TC por invasión competencial, como por los laboratorios farmacéuticos españoles cuyos intereses se han visto duramente perjudicados con el sistema andaluz. Sin embargo, el TC ha venido a avalar la constitucionalidad de la medida y parece que las últimas noticias apuntan a que se pueda convertir en una medida modelo para el resto de Comunidades Autónomas. De ahí, el interés en realizar este análisis jurídico sobre un tema de máxima actualidad y poder identificar los pros y contras de esta medida andaluza que si bien surge con un carácter claramente coyuntural –motivado por la crisis económica-, su reciente respaldo por el TC podría convertirla en una medida estructural en la dispensación de la prestación farmacéutica en nuestro país.

The Macroeconomic Impact of Delayed Government Payments: A Case Study

We analyze the impact of a drastic reduction in delayed governments’ payments on private sector activity. We focus on the case of Spain, a country in which a number of policy reforms were implemented to cope with increasing regional and local government payment periods and trade debt. Most noticeably, over 2012–2014 the Spanish central government approved various extraordinary mechanisms for the payment of local and regional government suppliers which have significantly reduced the stock of trade debt and the average supplier payment period of these levels of government. Successive plans have made it possible to unblock payments and channel funds of close to 7% of GDP to the private sector in somewhat less than three years, in a period of economic weakness, fiscal consolidation and tight credit. We explore the variety of channels on which plans of this type may operate through the lens of a macroeconomic model, and present empirical estimates of a positive impact of such policy measures on economic activity.

Grado de cumplimiento de las Leyes de transparencia, acceso y buen gobierno, y de reutilización de los datos de contratación de la Administración central española

This study looks at how and if the Spanish central government is currently meeting the laws of transparency and good governance by providing access to public data. The first part is a description of the most relevant legal standards relating to this topic. Subjects, information on recruitment, formats available to reuse information, and platforms on which these public data are published are identified. This study was performed using March 2016 data from the Public Platform for Hiring which is provided by the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration of Spain. The most important finding may be that the law has been correctly applied by the Spanish government for the reuse of information. On the other hand, accessing information is difficult and nearly half of the subjects do not offer hiring data despite this requirement.

Repensar las fronteras lingüísticas del territorio español: Melilla, entre mosaico sociológico y paradigma lingüístico

Este artículo presenta un estudio sociolingüístico de la ciudad de Melilla considerada, junto con Ceuta, como uno de los últimos resquicios del colonialismo español en África. Para ello, analizaremos los aspectos de la sociedad melillense que influyen en el uso de la lengua, entre los que destacamos las normas culturales y el contexto social. Melilla es una ciudad dotada de un valor único para la Sociolingüística por ser tanto un mosaico sociológico como un paradigma lingüístico. La convivencia entre judíos, cristianos y musulmanes que caracterizó a la Península ibérica se perpetúa aún en esta ciudad africana donde conviven diferentes comunidades, bereberes, españoles peninsulares, judíos e hindúes, convirtiéndola en heredera de la “España de las tres culturas”. Sin embargo, el estudio de sus componentes sociales y demográficos y el análisis de los resultados del trabajo de campo realizado en la ciudad, cuyos resultados presentaremos a continuación, nos muestran cómo la diversidad cultural a Melilla queda acantonada a una mera folclorización y declaración formal de intenciones. Esta ciudad goza de una diversidad lingüística, ya que junto con el español también se habla tamazight, pero esta lengua ha sido marginalizada institucionalmente y socialmente, imponiéndose así un monolingüismo alimentado por el poder central español.

Spain's ETA Terrorist Group is Dying

The armed organization “Basque Fatherland & Liberty” undertook a struggle for an independent homeland vis-à-vis Spanish central government over half a century ago. But today, the author argues, the ETA appears doomed for three reasons. First, Spanish statesmen of the late 1970s agreed to limited autonomy for Basque-dominated provinces, and over time this undermined militancy. Second, Paris has become a strong partner to Madrid in pursuing ETA members—who once could hide readily amidst French Basques. And finally, Spanish policing is now excellent. With good intelligence and professionalism, varied internal security forces have been confronting ETA gunmen and tracking down the personnel of proscribed support groups. Thus, a resilient Spanish democracy offers a case study in how terrorist groups may end.

The role of Spanish central government in a multi-level State

The Spanish polity has made the transition in the last three decades from a centralized system to a quasi-federal one characterized as having features of a shared power model with overlapping powers among levels of government. The new system has implied a change in the functions of central government from service delivery to planning and policy design. Enquiring beyond the hierarchy—non-hierarchy role of central government of intergovernmental studies, this article applies control concepts of oversight, mutuality, competition and contrived randomness from grid & group cultural theory in order to empirically examine the evolution of the role of central government in intergovernmental relations. Although the institutional features of the Spanish polity are expected to foster cooperative intergovernmental relations and a brokerage role of central government fostering mutual (peer) relations of the regions, the text suggests that institutional praxis and the ‘youth’ of the Spanish decentralization process are accountable for the direction taken by the Spanish polity. The system is characterized by central government still embedded in the inertia of oversight (with examples of fostering mutuality at times and in some policy fields) and by the regions seeking unilateralism through contrived randomness. Points for practitioners This text tries to unveil two distinct aspects of central government’s role in intergovernmental relations. First, it crosses the traditional axis (hierarchy and autonomy) between central/federal government and the regions/states when examining intergovernmental relations by including cases of competition and collegiality among the constituent parts. Second, it assumes that early stages of intergovernmental relations are likely to be conflictual regardless of the formal (cooperative) institutional design of the system. By acknowledging this, promoters of decentralization should be aware not only of the formal aspects of cooperation, but also of the informal mechanisms for building up cooperative practices.

The effectiveness of the Spanish urban transport contracts in terms of incentives

We consider a principal–agent model in which the regulator faces a moral hazard problem as he cannot observe the effort exerted by public transit operators. In this context, we analyse the effectiveness of the different urban transport contracts signed by the Spanish Central Government since 1990 in terms of incentives. The main result is that none of these contracts provides the appropriate incentives to public transit operators. Thus, we propose a fixed-quantity contract as an alternative financing mechanism. The fixed-quantity contract is a high-powered incentive contract that allows the regulator to perfectly forecast the amount of public funds to be used in the urban transport system. Moreover, the fixed-quantity contract can be adjusted to attain the equilibrium between incentives and optimal allocation of risk.

The Relationship between the Capacity of the Spanish Central Government to Retain Tax-Revenue Shares and Interregional Inequality

I examine the relationship between the dynamics of the size of the Spanish central government, by looking at central government tax-revenue-retention shares in different domestic regions, and regional-income heterogeneity. Annual data correspond to the 1986–2001 period. In addition to interregional inequality, other factors, such as per capita transfers from the central government, regional saving rates, and years in which there is a change in the party leading the central government, also contribute to the decreasing dynamics of revenues that are retained by the Spanish central government.

Decentralizing Democracy: Spain and Brazil in Comparative Perspective

Does decentralization of the state enhance democratic rule?' Does democratization make decentralization more manageable? The key intervening variable governing decentralization with democratization is the coherence of the central state. Following a path-dependent logic, studies of democratization argue that an array of factors present in society, that is, in the domain of political parties and parliamentary alliances, determines the coherence of the central state.2 The stronger political society is, and the greater the coherence of central authority is, then the more likely it will be that decentralization and democratization will reinforce each other. According to this argument, Spain's well-developed political society played a key role in enhancing national authority by controlling the content and pace of state reform and regime change. In Brazil these factors were anemic or missing, thereby weakening the state in ways that allowed decentralization to endanger democracy. The emphasis on political society in studies of democratization favors static factors that fail to account for the dynamic character of decentralization and democratization. The relationship between decentralization and democratization in Spain and Brazil was shaped by intergovernmental conflicts that were never fully under the control of either national states or political society. In both cases these conflicts challenged institutional arrangements in political society that studies of democratization credit with enhancing state cohesion. Efforts to resolve the conflicts in both countries depended upon ad hoc and transitory measures that were not imposed by a coherent national state. These dynamics challenged the Spanish central government's ability to govern the expanding authorities of the regions, exacerbating emerging divisions within the ruling Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrera Espanol, PSOE). In Brazil runaway spending by the states was impeded by a partial reequilibration of authority and resources in the central state during Fernando Henrique Cardoso's administration (1995-present). Explanation of these dynamics requires a focus on the bargaining process among levels of government. This process is mediated by two factors: the open-endedness of institutions governing the distribution of intergovernmental authorities and resources and the political leverage wielded by central and subnational governments. Where federal institutions are open-ended, subnational governments are more likely