The Dynamics of Political Decentralization: Analyzing the Interrelation Between Political Parties and the Media in Spain

Political decentralization is one of the key issues in Spanish politics. In this paper, we explain the dynamics of this process of increasing delegation of authority towards sub-national governments through the lenses of the policy dynamics approach, and argue that this process cannot simply be understood as a direct response to formal institutional factors or functional logics. Changes in political authority are the result of and intense and politicized debate in which rational policy makers content and ally across different arenas in order to push forward their policy preferences. They formulate policy proposals seeking for the support of their electorate, and establish alliances with different political parties and the media taking into account the institutional context in which they are immersed. Our results indicate that the capacity of policymakers to push forward their policy preferences depends to a large extend of the type of government and whether they are governing or in the opposition. State-wide political parties increase their attention to political decentralization in the parliamentarian arena when they are not governing as an strategy to erode the party in government. Our results also indicate the media has played a  key role in the policy process directing the attention toward different aspects of political decentralization. Policy makers react to media coverage and this is especially the case when they are in the opposition. To do the analysis, we rely on the databases about speeches, oral questions, parliamentary and governmental bills, decrees of transfer of competences, and stories of the front-pages of El Pais and El Mundo developed by the Spanish policy agendas project (www.ub.edu/spanishpolicyagendas). Each of these dimensions has been coded into 19 topics and 247 subtopics following the methodology of the comparative agendas project Jones and Baumgartner 2005, Baumgartner and Jones 1993). We have also created categorical variables to identify whether these political activities are related to political decentralization, and whether they are related to demands for self-rule or shared rule following Hooghe and Marks.