Department of Politics & International Relations

This paper sheds light on the reasons for the sudden rise of women in party politics and political representation in Spain. Structural explanations and the conditioning influence of the electoral system are reviewed before focusing on institutional and party-political explanations. It argues that the key factor in explaining this rise is not just the adoption of rules on gender parity representation, but the intra-party politics that allows for effective implementation of such rules. Using insights into the internal dynamics of the PSOE, gained from extensive field observations and interviews, it argues that high levels of female representation were secured via internal party procedures, coupled with political backing from the party leadership. The paper therefore takes the discussion on
women’ s participation in representative politics beyond the question of adopting quota rules into the terrain of how, instead of remaining a dead letter, parity is successfully
implemented in practice.

The main social challenges faced by European societies are said to be similar to those that confront all industrial societies, at least at the macro-level: the new labour order, the ageing of populations, the trend towards migration and multi-ethnicity, new social risks, regional differentiation and the demands on people of the knowledge-based economy (Maydell v. et al. 2006: 50). In such a context, regional associations can find an appropriate role in helping to bring nations together to confront these social challenges. This is the case of the European Union (EU), which is increasingly projecting itself both as the forum where discussion of common problems should take place and as the venue where solutions will be found – through the reform of the European Social Model (The Lisbon Council 2008) and through streamlining and consolidating social policies into the heart of integration policy (Maydell v. et al. 2006: 285–95). For its part, the second major European regional body, the Council of Europe, has been credited for its role in opening up discussion of social and human rights issues to the countries of Eastern Europe (Huber 1999). Its aims include social goals such as ‘to find common solutions to the challenges facing European society: such as discrimination against minorities, xenophobia, intolerance, bioethics and cloning, terrorism, trafficking in human beings, organized crime and corruption, cyber crime, violence against children’ (Council of Europe 2008). In other words, both organizations see themselves as part of the solution.

With the repeated adherence of new member states – currently twenty-seven – and the continuing queue for membership from Eastern and Southern European states, the European Union is the most advanced of the world’s regional socio-economic and political integration projects. And with its ever-evolving Treaties – most recently the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon – and the repeated extension of powers accorded to its central supra-national body, the European Commission, it is also the world’s most developed case of nation-states pooling their sovereignty.

The extensive research on European integration so far offers little to explain the effect of EU social policies on integration between member-states. Starting from the premise that there is a parallel process of social integration accompanying developments in political and economic integration, the article defines ‘social integration’ and uses it as a tool for exploring the effects of EU policy and law from the citizen’s perspective. It defines four types of social integration and reviews existing fields of policy regulation in relation to the typology.  Then areas are identified where boundaries between member-states have fallen to the extent that citizens can experience living in the EU as if it were a single country, using the term ‘single social areas’.  Finally, it is argued that the article’s approach advances understandings of the European integration process and ways of relating it to integration theory are suggested for further research.

Regional integration processes can learn from the particularities of the European Union’s social dimension, despite its apparent inconsistencies and sui generis form of development. The article provides a comprehensive retrospective overview of developments, and pays particular attention to the political and technical procedures adopted for progressing social policy. It argues that a regional integration process in a wide range of social fields has developed in the EU despite facing dissent and dilemmas for over 50
years. It claims that the EU now enjoys a working and workable
apparatus of policies, practices and laws in a broad social dimension, that are not only far more extensive than first envisaged in the Treaty of Rome, but are also destined to expand further. In particular, the article moves beyond previous accounts in arguing that procedural complexity has been an intrinsic and creative intrinsic and creative part of the social dimension to European integration.

This is a proposal for a new electoral system that combines valuable features of the Single Member Plurality (SMP, First-past-the-post) system and of the proportional representation systems that ensure a closer correlation of each party's vote with its number of seats in parliament. The new system's distinctive feature is the separation of the process of electing candidates in constituencies from the process of allocating seats to parties, which passes to larger electoral districts (EDs). Such a separation allows candidates to be elected on a plurality/majoritarian basis from within a small single-member constituency, which forms part of a larger electoral district in which seats are allocated in a fairly proportional way to each party according to its total vote in the district, as opposed to in the constituency.
Thus, constituency-based voters with a strong preference for one candidate will see their favourite win a seat, but the electorate of the wider electoral district will see their party preferences reflected in a fairly proportional manner in the district and consequently in parliament too. Such a system safeguards the constituency links of popular representatives but also ensures that the composition of legislative chambers fairly represents the preferences of the countrywide electorate overall. The political system thus benefits from having a more representative balance of parties in Parliament, and a more varied set of legislators speaking on behalf of increasingly diverse 21st century populations.
This proposal for a new electoral system was devised in the context of the discontent manifested against the British SMP system, which led to a failed attempt at electoral reform in 2010, and is therefore designed for a transition from a single-winner majoritarian system to a more proportional one. But it could also be used to modify PR systems in countries where popular discontent reigns over their excessive - or conversely insufficient - proportionality and over allegedly weak links between representatives and constituents that lead to charges of a lack of accountability.

Although the EU launched its first citizenship programme in 1992 with considerable fanfare, arguably nothing much changed for employees who had already moved to another member-state. True, the system of aggregation of entitlements and 'pro-ratarisation', launched in 1957, is continually being developed and perfected. But in terms of political citizenship -- traditionally understood as the right to vote and to stand for election -- free movers both then and subsequently have gained no substantial new rights. Their right to vote for the government of the day remains fully curtailed by nationality barriers. As Shaw (2007) remarked, '…the denial of rights remains the status quo…'. So while the number of employees moving to jobs in other MS may be increasing at a faster rate than before 1992, the result is, arguably, an increase in taxpayers who cannot vote for the government that decides how to spend their taxes. This constitutes a return to a pre-democratic taxation without representation. As a phenomenon, this can hardly be considered an advance in citizenship, especially in the midst of new discourses on European Citizenship and democracy, though it is worth noting that work on democracy such as Held (2006) considers new forms of inclusion such as deliberative democracy but not the extension of suffrage.
This paper focused on these free movers, encouraged to move, work and pay taxes, but prevented from taking part in electing the government of the day. How do they see their situation and participation? The methodology for the research took some cues from Gamson (1992/1996)Talking Politics with its validation of qualitative approaches to investigating people's awareness of political issues through conversations rather than surveys. In this way, organised group discussions were held with 28 participants recruited through the formalised channels of social and market research companies, with the discussions (in English or Spanish) recorded in audio-visual studios, and subsequently transcribed.

The paper discusses several cases of 'state feminism' - such as Sweden, Norway, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Spain. It shows that the term is used in such a variety of contexts and to refer to such contrasting and even contradictory phenomena that it is in danger of having any real meaning sucked out of it. The paper proposes that both the use of the term 'state feminism' and the analyses of the various national experiences to which it refers underplay the role of the party in power at the time. In Western  Europe at least, it is more accurate to talk of social-democratic feminism in power.

Spain’s democratization process has mainly been described as a settlement between political elites in which civil society organizations played little part. Yet the literature on Eastern
European democratization sets great store by the role of civil society, both for transition and consolidation. Does this different treatment reflect the approach adopted by analysts or the actual contrasting presence of civil society organizations in the relevant periods? The question prompts this re-examination of the role of civil society organizations in the Spanish transition.
It finds that the answer depends in part on definitions of civil society, but mainly on the approach taken by authors in presenting their accounts. It finds that the elite settlement perspective silences or removes agency from the Spanish civil society organizations active in the transition. An alternative view is developed through an in-depth review of the events following the death of the dictator General Franco in 1975 and a textual analysis of Spain’s actual definitive settlement, the 1978 Constitution. The research demonstrates that civil society organisations were responsible for disrupting the dictatorship’s intention to maintain an authoritarian regime, leaving it no option but to negotiate with civil society organizations such as political parties and trade unions, which were pursuing their own strategic goals towards co-construction of a socially advanced democracy. The article’s approach bridges the gulf between top-down and bottom-up accounts of political change in Spain at the end of the Franco regime.

This chapter draws together the themes guiding the development of "reconciliation policies", the set of employment dispositions and laws designed to make having a family life/becoming parents more compatible with holding down a job. This was an important concern for feminists and parents generally, which flourished in the EU in the 1990s and was enforced and sustained until the economic crisis of 2008 onwards put a strain on them.

This chapter developed a model with 5 variants showing how this 'reconciliation' and 'compatibility' between the two worlds of earning and caring - also known as 'the work-life balance' - could be achieved within households both at the level of the need for 'pay' and the need for 'time'.

This report is a call to those seeking to capture a picture of Social Europe to better reflect Europe's diversity and the claims of numerically important social sectors such as women, carers, ethnic minorities, disabled people, Muslims, vulnerable workers and migrants, whose difficult situations are too often excluded from comprehensive overviews. As the UK stakeholders contributing here show, this initiative could be reiterated in other member-states and offers a model for creating an alternative portrait of Europe: a full family portrait that gathers its different and new social components into the frame –

El capítulo desarrolla una fuerte crítica a los enfoques elitistas que interpretan a la transición española como un pacto entre élites. Propone que la transición due co-construida por fuerzas opuestas en un proceso de lucha política ganada por los partidos democráticos y las organizaciones de la sociedad civil, como lo demuestra el contenido de la Constitución de 1978.