Local politics in Spain has triggered iconic shifts over the last few years, and the electoral success of new ‘movement parties’ in particular has dramatically challenged the political establishment. Between 2015 and 2019, many municipalities – including, crucially, the two biggest cities, Madrid and Barcelona – were governed by coalitions originating from anti-austerity, anti-eviction and pro-democracy struggles. This has significantly affected hegemonic and widely normalised discourses supporting the neoliberalisation of urban politics, and to some extent has also prompted novel governance approaches. Based on empirical research undertaken with local councillors, officials, consultants and activists, the article develops an in-depth analysis of governance transformations in the Spanish capital of Madrid. By doing so, it evaluates the ambiguities and contradictions that the government coalition Ahora Madrid was facing during the 2015–2019 legislative term. The debate stimulates critical reflections for academics, practitioners and movements on the transformative capacities that new municipalisms may enact, as well as the constraints faced by established multi-level urban governance regimes.

This article focuses on the policy process stemming from European cohesion policy at the regional level and at its programming stage (which precedes the implementation phase). It aims to explain how the formally introduced EU ‘partnership’ principles and rules work in practice in different political environments. The article argues that externally introduced procedural decision rules have different impacts on effective policymaking processes. In particular, we suggest that the patterns of social capital linkages carried by the actors involved produce different regional policy networks, even though the existing formal rules are similar. Relying on social network analysis as its main methodological tool, the article presents empirical evidence drawn from two similar Spanish regions, identifies the characteristics of the actors’ social capital and compares the structures of the policy networks dealing with the programming tasks in the two regions. Our findings suggest that the structures differ according to the amount of linking social capital displayed by the actors involved in the policy networks. We discuss in detail our exploratory hypothesis, considering also other possible variables that might account for these variations. Points for practitioners In this article we demonstrate that the EU partnership principle, as a set of formal rules, does not always work in practice as expected; we found that only when the actors involved share a certain level of trust does it produce and reinforce the expected pluralist and deliberative contexts for decision-making. In fact, EU partnership rules contribute to making policymaking more transparent and better procedurally organized by essentially sorting out the social capital resources already possessed by public and private actors involved in the policy network. This suggests that investing in the creation of social capital for regional elites might significantly improve the current EU institutional design of regional policy. More generally, we argue that partnership designs that provide stronger incentives for political and social elites to build their own social capital resources could make the implementation of decentralized regional policies more effective.

This article discusses how nationalist regional and state-wide parties, responding to different sub-national party systems dynamics, contribute similarly to interregional and individual public opinion disagreements about the model of the state in new, successfully decentralized democracies. Using individual survey data and other regional-level aggregate measures to perform a multilevel analysis in the 17 Spanish regions, we will show that both types of parties (non-and state-wide parties), following certain sub-national party system dynamics, are a very important influential and conditional factor in explaining the individual preferences adopted by citizens regarding the model of the state, despite the generally positive evaluation of the performance of new decentralized institutions by a large majority of Spaniards. These different positions are producing a persistent inter-individual conflict among Spaniards that have also a strong interregional component.

El estudio de las instituciones políticas, en general, y particularmente en España, ha dedicado una atención limitada al análisis de las élites políticas, aunque se percibe un interés creciente en la literatura reciente. No obstante, las decisiones que emanan de tales instituciones están condicionadas por los perfiles, preferencias y disposiciones de los individuos que ocupan los puestos de autoridad. Por ello se hace necesario un análisis sistemático de las élites políticas españolas, especialmente en momentos de amplia desafección política. Partiendo de los datos recogidos en un estudio pionero, en este trabajo se analizan las características fundamentales de los representantes políticos en las cámaras autonómicas y nacionales en España, sus preferencias políticas, la percepción que tienen del problema de la desafección política, los orígenes de su vocación política y la forma en la que se desarrolla la actividad parlamentaria en el seno de los parlamentos.

RESUMENEl estudio de las instituciones políticas, en general, y particularmente en España, ha dedicado una atención limitada al análisis de las élites políticas, aunque se percibe un interés creciente en la literatura reciente. No obstante, las decisiones que emanan de tales instituciones están condicionadas por los perfiles, preferencias y disposiciones de los individuos que ocupan los puestos de autoridad. Por ello se hace necesario un análisis sistemático de las élites políticas españolas, especialmente en momentos de amplia desafección política. Partiendo de los datos recogidos en un estudio pionero, en este trabajo se analizan las características fundamentales de los representantes políticos en las cámaras autonómi-cas y nacionales en España, sus preferencias polí-ticas, la percepción que tienen del problema de la desafección política, los orígenes de su vocación política y la forma en la que se desarrolla la actividad parlamentaria en el seno de los parlamentos. Palabras clave: Élites políticas, parlamentos, representación, vocación política, actividad parlamentaria. ABSTRACT