Political Clientelism, Elites, and Caciquismo in Restoration Spain (1875—1923)

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Political Clientelism, Elites, and Caciquismo in Restoration Spain (1875–1923 Javier Moreno-Luzón Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales (Madrid), Spain

In Spain, as in other European countries, the establishment of liberal political regimes during the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth was closely linked with the customs and institutions that in Spanish are known by the generic term caciquismo. Caciquismo refers to the proliferation of clientelist practices by local notables or caciques, and it is specifically associated with the Restoration era (1875–1923), a decisive period in the development of modern Spain. Both intellectuals of that time and historians of later generations have considered caciquismo one of the fundamental characteristics of the Spanish political system; and they have looked to caciquismo to explain the failure of the transition from liberalism to democracy in the first third of the twentieth century. Research into caciquismo has indeed become a well-defined speciality within Spanish historiography, and a ‘growth industry’ – as Raymond Carr has indicated – generating an abundance of publications which are difficult to follow for those who do not devote themselves full-time to the topic.1 The revival of historical studies in the democratic Spain of the last 30 years began with intensive research into the first half of the nineteenth century, where the causes of Spain’s backwardness were associated with the failure of the bourgeois revolution. More recently, and continuing up to the present time, historians have turned their attention to the inexhaustible topic of the Spanish Civil War, examining both its causes and its consequences in the early period of the Franco dictatorship. Nonetheless, the Restoration has occupied a privileged space in its own right in debates among historians and sometimes at various commemorative events, in political circles and in the mass media. It is therefore now possible to take stock of what has been written and to disseminate it outside Spanish academic circles. European History Quarterly Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, ca, and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 37(3), 417–441 issn 0265-6914. doi: 10.1177/0265691407078445

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This article intends to do just that by covering three issues: a brief historical outline and traditional explanation of caciquismo in political analysis and in historiography; an overview of the prevailing historiographical tendencies – referred to here as new political history and agrarian social history; and some suggestions about the paths of research which may be followed in the future. Moreover, the article includes some comparative reflections on Spanish caciquismo and similar phenomena in other European countries.

1. Political Analysis and Caciquismo Caciquismo, understood as the impact of powerful local bosses on Spanish politics, put down its roots, at the very latest, in the transition from the ancien régime to a liberal system. However, it became a serious, even urgent political problem during the Restoration, when this matter was considered by political analysts to be at the heart of all that was wrong with the public life of the country and was the focal point of their concern and their ideas of change. In the 1880s criticism of the well-established system of turno pacífico began to spread. The turno pacífico was the contrived alternation of power between conservatives and liberals, and was based on the manipulation of elections carried out to a large extent by the caciques. As is well known, the two governing parties alternated in power under the adjudication of the crown, with the understanding that whoever came into office was guaranteed a majority in Parliament by means of rigged elections, which were planned by the authorities and implemented by the caciques. In exchange, the caciques were able to take advantage of the public powers available, both for themselves and for their clientele. The turno, based on caciquismo, gave stability to the liberal regime, playing the same role as other contemporary political practices like rotativismo in Portugal or trasformismo in Italy. Like their Spanish equivalent, those political systems attracted strong criticism of their practical functioning and clientelist manners, attacks based on legal, political and moral considerations.2 As an indication of opinion at the time, the 1884 edition of the Spanish Academy dictionary included the word caciquismo for the first time, defining it as the excessive influence of caciques over villages. In other words, a negative character was already associated with the traditional role of the most influential elements in every locality. Standing out among the authors who joined this analytical vein was the republican Gumersindo de Azcárate, whose works first and foremost attacked the corrupt parliamentary dealings of Restoration politicians.3 Unsurprisingly, Azcárate referred to Marco Minghetti’s criticism of the corruption of Italian political parties.4 In Spain, Azcárate claimed, the liberal parliamentary

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system had brought about a great deal of corruption which discredited it. This corruption included the supremacy of the executive over legislative and judicial powers, electoral fraud, party factionalism and a public administration suffering from overcentralization, bureaucracy, red tape and an eagerness to hold public office, ills all associated with caciquismo. Azcárate went on to state: Behind the pretence of representative government, this new kind of feudalism, a hundred times more repugnant than the military feudalism of the Middle Ages, hides a petty, hypocritical and illegitimate oligarchy, for the reason that caciques and governments organize the elections between them, and if the latter need the former and the former the latter, both of them need the member of parliament to nurture their constituency.5 According to Azcárate, one of the most serious problems of the Spanish parliamentary system was the predominance of special interests – personal, local or party – over general or national interests amongst representatives; in short, that parliamentary members became agents of the caciques who controlled their electoral constituencies. Immorality had taken hold of Spanish politics and this naturally led to people becoming more detached from their political leaders. However, Azcárate thought that the defects could be resolved by using the law, because the corruption was not dependent on the parliamentary system and it was possible to put an end to it legalistically – for example, by the establishment of a new administrative process – and terminate the characteristically arbitrary nature of abuses. Politicians of other tendencies also shared this diagnosis and enthusiasm for legalistic solutions. Among them were the conservatives Francisco Silvela and Antonio Maura, who placed their faith in electoral and local administration reforms. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, in response to the national identity crisis provoked by the 1898 Disaster – the loss of the last of the Spanish colonies in a brief and humiliating war with the United States – caciquismo ceased to be just one of the many problems troubling the Spanish political system. It became the fundamental problem, the key to explaining the backwardness of Spain and the overriding obstacle to the urgent modernization of the country. This attitude is found in the works of the so-called regeneracionistas, a fertile intellectual group who, while they did not begin writing until after 1898, made a significant impact on the thought of that time. Its most conspicuous exponent was without doubt Joaquín Costa, who, with a finely tuned sense for bluntness, succeeded in dismissing the liberal Spanish political system which had culminated in the Restoration as Oligarchy and Caciquismo. This was the title of the work which preceded a survey on the subject carried out by the Ateneo de Madrid6

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in 1901. This survey included widely differing opinions, but Costa’s was the most influential. According to his view of the problem: Our form of government is not a parliamentary system, contaminated by abuse and corruption, as is normally understood, but on the contrary an oligarchic system, served rather than restrained by ostensibly parliamentary institutions.7 Costa drew attention to an egotistical oligarchy, a sort of alien faction which did not govern for the Spanish but for themselves, which dominated and exploited the country while supporting itself on the caciques: omnipotent men who exercised an unrestrained despotism – Costa speaks of ‘His majesty the cacique’ – on a subject and impoverished people. Oligarchies and caciques, brought together by the provincial governors, prevented progress in Spain and led to ‘backwardness, misery, ignorance, slavery’.8 It was necessary to undertake not just a series of legal reforms, but a serious surgical operation under the responsibility of an iron surgeon to liberate the nation from those who had abducted it. This operation was incompatible, at least for the time being, with a parliamentary regime. These ideas, impregnated with a strong dose of morality, remained current among the critics of the Restoration and, in general, among those who have examined the issue up to the present time. The ensuing intellectual generation of 1914 continued, albeit with less artistic flourish than Costa, to draw attention to the use which the governing oligarchy made of caciquismo politics which, they argued, disqualified it from leading the ‘Europeanization’ of Spain, a process which they considered indispensable. The leader of this generation, José Ortega y Gasset, decreed the ‘death of the Restoration’ and made it clear that the dynastic politicians, the protagonists of ‘official Spain’, who were organizers of the corruption, profoundly incompetent and detached from the ‘central concerns of the Spaniard of today’, were utterly finished.9 ‘Living Spain’, formed by the new professional elites, would carry out the necessary tasks to push the Spanish towards the future. This division between official Spain and dynamic Spain was to have a considerable influence on many subsequent authors. Even in 1923, the future President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, thought that the persistence of caciquismo (from which he himself had suffered in the elections of one rural constituency), entailed the edification of a ‘fraudulent power, effective and all-embracing, although extrajudicial’. The cacique, tolerated by the oligarchy for whose interests it offered its services, continued to exercise its ancestral powers and had become an ‘enemy of the law’ and ‘kidnapper of liberty’, a ‘coral reef’, an obstacle to the effective participation of the people in the government or, what is the same, the democratization of the country’.10

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Since the 1920s, those who have described the difficult implantation of democracy in Spain have made use of the key elements of these political analyses. Above all, the Restoration regime has always been associated with the machinations of caciquismo. This has led to the development of a broader line of approach, which points to the unrepresentative nature of this political system and its components, the parties and the Parliament, considered artificial and made up of political elites who were distant from the real problems of the people. Moreover, it is argued that the governing classes wished to continue falsifying the popular will and thus prevented the emancipation of citizens, while still another consequence was that the system became impervious to change, paralysed and incapable of adapting itself to the social changes of the first quarter of the twentieth century. The rejection of caciquismo inspired by Costa and others has equally been used by anti-liberal elements who, despising the parliamentary system, have tried to discredit it by making references to its supposedly depraved nature. This approach can clearly be observed in the arguments used by the supporters of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, who considered himself Costa’s iron surgeon, ready to remove the cancer of caciquismo.11

2. Historiographical approaches Following the Spanish Civil War and the immediate post-war period, there was a historiographical resurgence which revealed a new analysis of the political life of the nineteenth century. The most distinguished work was by Jaume Vicens Vives, the natural successor to the previously-mentioned intellectuals. Vicens added a new social and economic dimension to their work, demonstrating the links between political and economic power, something which had not been considered relevant by the turn-of-the century writers.12 However, it was only during the 1960s and 1970s, as academic studies about the contemporary period gained prominence, that generalized and superficial political works gave way to solid and coherent historical interpretations. Although some of their assumptions were merely hypotheses without empirical backing, they still have not been entirely discarded. Manuel Suárez Cortina has identified four schools of thought which came together in the 1970s and have strongly influenced subsequent historians. These currents rely on the following definitions of caciquismo: (1) a system of class domination, (2) a brake on modernization implemented by the landowning elites, (3) the hegemony of local power bases, (4) a political framework based on patron-client relationships.13 However, in order to tackle the issue with greater clarity, it is more useful to group the theses on caciquismo into two main historiographical trends, according to their interpretation of the nature and origin of the phenomenon.14

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The first of these schools considers caciquismo to have a socio-economic origin and understands it as a tool that was used by the ruling Spanish social oligarchy to maintain its grip on power. Richard Herr maintained that there was a hierarchy of caciques running parallel to the structures of the state and supported by landowning elites who resisted modernization.15 Many authors inspired by Marxist theory also subscribed to this school, insisting that the caciques’ political power was subordinated to the interests of the dominant class. A similar development can be observed in some Italian historiography on the liberal era, influenced by the Marxist ideas of Antonio Gramsci.16 The influence of Manuel Tuñón de Lara was especially important: he defined the elites of the Restoration as an oligarchic power block made up of landowners, industrialists and financiers, closely related to the dynastic parties and with interests that determined political decisions.17 The cacique was considered part of these networks and was identified with landowners. Tuñón’s portrait acquired a strong southern flavour: The cacique is the moneybags of the village, himself a landowner or representative of a local noble residing in Court; the agricultural workers depend on him for their work and whether or not they die of starvation; the tenant farmers depend on him as he can expel them from the land or allow them to cultivate it; the average small farmer depends on him in order to borrow money. The village Guardia Civil is in collusion with the cacique; the school teacher – who lives in miserable conditions – is subjected to his authority; the parish priest generally prefers to collaborate with him; in short, he is the new feudal lord, the all-powerful.18 Alfonso Ortí, the author of the most sophisticated version of this Marxist viewpoint, demonstrated that property constituted the basis of the cacique’s political power. The structure of caciquismo – an authentic political institution of the country – was conceived as an instrument to defend the interests of the privileged classes, especially the owners of large and middle-sized estates in Castile and Andalusia. These classes imposed themselves on the proletariat and outlying petite bourgeoisie by means of their domination of the centralized and oligarchic political machinery.19 This interpretation was closely associated with what Santos Juliá has referred to as the ‘paradigm of failure’. It assumes that modern Spain was characterized by the absence or the frustration of the great transformations which other western countries underwent, changes such as the industrial revolution, the bourgeois revolution or even a genuine liberal revolution which might have led to the establishment of democracy.20 Spain was an exception in the West, an archaic agricultural country, and caciquismo formed part of this unusual state of affairs,

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this illiterate and rural society dominated by an anti-modern oligarchy with strong traces of the ancien régime. It was a state of affairs that in the long term led to the implantation of a dictatorship and created a situation that culminated in the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. Curiously, this feeling of exceptionality and distinctiveness, the affirmation of a national ‘special path’ or Sonderweg, could also be found, with different meanings, in historical works about other countries such as Italy and Germany.21 Meanwhile, a second historiographical trend was taking shape, providing a different interpretation of the significance of caciquismo in the political life of the Restoration. Starting with the teachings of Raymond Carr in Oxford and José María Jover in Madrid, a new generation of historians submerged itself in the archives and succeeded in elaborating a fairly complete description of the politics of the Restoration. From its findings, it went on to produce a new global interpretation of the phenomenon. In this trend, the writers José Varela Ortega, Joaquín Romero Maura and Javier Tusell stand out.22 This trend, though not homogeneous, shares elements of a common approach. First, these historians examined the functioning of the political system, above all by concentrating on the electoral process. They therefore explained the meaning and rhythm of the alternation of power between conservatives and liberals, and the mechanisms by which those in government always managed to get a majority in parliament for their party and a substantial minority for the opposition. Tusell, in his work on Andalusia, gave a brilliant account of the elaboration of the encasillado – the agreement which preceded elections and anticipated the result – and explained how, in general, the wishes of the executive systematically came true on election day, when a high level of corruption was habitual. The encasillado constituted the most outstanding peculiarity of the Spanish case. Varela Ortega, for his part, classified the different types of constituencies and the electoral influence of the powerful, observing that at the time traditional caciquismo (support based on deference) coexisted with transitional caciquismo (support in return for compensation), the violent type (support due to threats) and the transactional type (support which was paid for). Varela Ortega and Romero Maura were inspired by British anthropologists and historians that had dealt with those matters before them. Second, these descriptions had an underlying conception of caciquismo as a political phenomenon, in which the powerful did not derive their power from their economic position but from their management of the administrative resources that control of the state provided them. More than an instrument at the service of a dominating class, the system of caciques was a type of political organization. The caciques, as Romero Maura underlined, were not necessarily the wealthy of the

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village, the landowners who, owing to their position, controlled the town hall and orchestrated the elections, but often people of modest background who knew how the state bureaucracy worked. Tusell spoke of two types of influential politicians, the local notable and the professional. Varela Ortega wrote that the key to the system ‘was in the control of the administration’ and that ‘the existence of an omnipresent and complex administrative machinery (whose handling required a degree of skill and professional qualifications) provided for a greater degree of social mobility than expected in a backward rural society’.23 Added to these claims was the rejection of the idea of a power block described by Tuñón; instead, it was held that political decisions were independent of economic interests. On this point, Varela Ortega asserted that as the politicians of the Restoration did not depend on economic powers but on the politico-administrative machinery of caciquismo to survive, they did not defer to the important agrarian and industrial interests, although they could occasionally reach agreements with them.24 Lastly, their conception of caciquismo rejected the idea that it was in any way a uniquely Spanish experience. Caciquismo was, above all, patronage, that is, the Spanish version of a universal phenomenon, which grafted itself onto the public administration. As such, it was possible to compare Restoration Spain to other European historical situations such as ‘old corruption’ in England, Napoleon III’s France – where official candidates were usually elected – or, naturally, Giovanni Giolitti’s Italy, where great dignitaries fed their own clienteles with public resources.25 The system of the Restoration was in fact similar to that of other European countries; that is, it consisted of a liberal regime based on client networks which the political parties established in a rural and passive society. As a result, the system could even have transformed itself in the same way as in other European states, through inner spontaneous reforms or pressure by a widening participation in parliamentary elections. As Raymond Carr states, it could have been reformed and become a democracy had it not been for General Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état in 1923.26 After the development of these foundational works, the 1980s were characterized by a vast proliferation of historical works which succeeded in bringing together a wealth of material on the political life of the Restoration.27 Although the historiographical production of this period was again rather varied, it had three general features. First, the majority of the works limited themselves to the local, provincial or regional level, reflecting the generous financing of research and publications through local political institutions such as town and city halls, county councils and regional governments in Spain during this period. In this way, the multicoloured mosaic of the Restoration was gradually put together. Second, the main focus of these studies was the elections, and this filled the gaps

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in knowledge about electoral fraud and corruption, and the results of elections. There was only minor interest in the characteristics of the political elites and the economic and social conditions which surrounded the system of caciquismo. Third, research tended to be very descriptive. It did not go beyond the locality and can be said to suffer from excessive parochialism. Apart from a few exceptions,28 the new works avoided generalizations, even simply in confirming the hypotheses of others, and did not risk putting forward new interpretations.

3. New Outlooks in the Study of Caciquismo Since the end of the 1980s, historical work on the Spanish Restoration, and also caciquismo, has moved forward considerably. For example, the work has explored new ways of studying public life, such as the use of the concept of political modernization to analyse the resistance of elites and the difficulties which kept them opposed to the democratization of the system.29 There has been research into the impact of universal male suffrage (introduced in 1890) on electoral behaviour, and a new classification of constituencies has been drawn up.30 Likewise, there have been dozens of studies about political parties and biographies of leading protagonists.31 Most importantly, a new wave of local studies has appeared which has overcome the defects of the previous ones: the new studies succeed in overcoming the limitations of localism by posing general questions, even using a common vocabulary which enables debate and historical progress. In this way, this work has led to the formulation of two distinct approaches to the politics of caciquismo. The most widespread approach can be referred to as ‘new political history’; the other, less common alternative may be called ‘agrarian social history’, and has emerged recently on the basis of an enthusiastic criticism of the hegemonic tendency of new political history. 3.1 New political history Among young historians, the new political history is the influential tendency, and it has produced various provincial portraits and some collective works. One noteworthy example is El poder de la influencia. Geografía del caciquismo en España (The power of influence: the geography of caciquismo in Spain), edited by Varela Ortega. It is a synthesis of the available information on each of the Spanish regions and an essential starting point for further investigation.32 This school shares some of the initial preoccupations of the political history of the 1970s, but examines them in greater depth and expands them. To begin with, it focuses on politics as a suitable viewpoint for observing, interrelating and making sense of the multiple factors which make up the social, economic and

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cultural reality. Another of its distinguishing features is the use of concepts derived from the social sciences, such as sociology, political science and, to a lesser extent, anthropology. Much use has been made, though in a somewhat eclectic fashion, of the academic literature on political clientelism.33 Finally, much emphasis is given to comparisons, especially with other European events which were similar to Spanish caciquismo. This perspective stresses the absolute lack of any particular originality in caciquismo, which is simply considered a variant of a generalized phenomenon which has already been well-defined. When comparing Spain to other European countries, historians have looked to the case of liberal Italy, and especially to the period 1876–1914, where the similarities to the Spanish Restoration make it easy to draw parallels. The comparative efforts have brought together Spanish and Italian historians in international research teams which steadily grow in number. In principle, the Spanish political system of turno pacífico and the Italian system of trasformismo were different. In Spain, two big parties periodically took turns in power, while in Italy, there was a central, multifaceted and unsettled parliamentary nucleus which supported the governments.34 However, some historians have highlighted the similarities between turno and trasformismo. They have pointed out that both systems, presided over by conservative constitutional monarchies, were designed to stabilize their respective regimes by securing consensuses among liberal elites and leaving out anti-liberal sectors of the Catholic right and groups of leftist republicans and revolutionaries. Moreover, both systems were based on the distribution of administrative resources among members of parliament and local dignitaries, which fed their clients and won their fidelity as it extended corruption in public administration. Also in both cases, the meddling of the government in elections, linked to this clientelist structure, secured like-minded parliamentary majorities at the cost of producing high levels of fraud.35 Historical research has also revealed big differences between the Spanish Restoration and contemporary Italy. According to some authors, the Spanish system was much more rigid and more reluctant to accept changes than the Italian system. In Italy, at least in the north of the country, the elections depended less on government-induced fraud than in Spain. They were more open to competition and, around the turn of the century and during the Giolitti government, fully incorporated previously marginalized groups like the socialist party. The election dynamic shows a Spanish electorate that was much more pro-abstention than Italian voters, even though universal male suffrage was introduced in Spain much earlier (1890 in Spain; 1912, with important restrictions related to literacy, in Italy). According to some descriptions, one might think that in Spain almost the whole country shared the passive political behaviour of southern Italy, that Spain

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was an enormous Mezzogiorno.36 In the period 1914–22/3, the differences between the two countries became more pronounced, given Italy’s participation and Spain’s neutrality in the First World War. There was worker mobilization and counterrevolutionary reaction in both countries. However, while the rise of fascism to power in 1922 was the product of a mass movement that took advantage of the democratization of the political system, the Spanish dictatorship of 1923 was established via a military coup d’état.37 A second distinctive feature of the new political history of the Restoration is the issues covered, especially the following three: the political elites, the parties and party clienteles, and political behaviour in general. With regard to the elites, research has been carried out on influential individuals in public life, both considered individually and collectively, using prosopographical methods, regularly found in several biographies. Almost all the interest has centred on members of parliament, especially those who held a strategic place in the political system, being the link between the localities and the central authority.38 However, over time, more attention has come to be paid to those lower down the ladder of political representation, such as the ayuntamientos (town councils) and diputaciones provinciales (county councils), which were a staging post in the cursus honorum of MPs, and played a vital role in the nationwide power system.39 Thanks to detailed biographical studies, the social characteristics of these political elites have been clarified. One should remember that politicians during the Restoration had to have independent means. As a result, there were many property owners and landlords, liberal professionals and civil servants, merchants and industrialists, and often the same individuals were in several of these categories. As is to be expected, the profile of the elites varied according to region. The landowners held a strategic position in Andalusia, Extremadura and some parts of Castile, where they benefited from the liberal revolution in the nineteenth century. However, in many areas, the agricultural owners represented just one component, and not the dominant one, of the political elites. Besides, on many occasions, the most influential farmers were not the large latifundistas (owners of large estates), but the well-organized farmers who grew commercial crops and had extensive contacts with the state bureaucracy, as occurred in Valencia. The second social group with a widespread presence among the elite were professionals, especially lawyers (not to be confused with those holding a law degree, since many of these did not practise law), predominant in judicial seats and in some regions such as Catalonia or Galicia (in the latter due to the complex nature of the system of land tenancy). Many self-made men were able to reach the peaks of political and business life thanks to their knowledge of laws and the administration system.

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Other professionals – such as journalists, professors or engineers – also exercised important functions in specified areas. In the third place were businessmen, who worked in industry, commerce and finance. They were almost absent in poorer regions like Extremadura but very active in Catalonia and especially the Basque country (where the captains of the mining and iron and steel industries established a political clique, doing so without intermediaries, and presented themselves directly in elections). The study of political elites shows them to have a very close relationship with their respective local economic surroundings. Generally, they were people linked to the most dynamic sectors of each region, from commercial agriculture to railways or mining – sugar processors in Andalusia, flour mill owners in Castile and tinned-food manufacturers in Galicia, wholesale merchants in Murcia, exporters of wine and esparto in Alicante, and shipowners in Majorca, Valencia, Seville and Cádiz. Sometimes they controlled multiple branches of the regional economy, but normally they were medium-sized employers, who together with landowners and professionals formed an upper-bourgeoisie,40 which was continuously changing, as over time the landowners gave ground to the professionals and businessmen. As a result, the old aristocracy occupied an almost marginal position among the elites. So it is difficult to cling to the idea that the powerful in Restoration Spain embodied a continuation of the ancien régime. While there have been many discoveries of links and common ground between the political and economic elites, it is still not possible to speak of a total identification between them – in other words, a power block in the manner of Tuñón – in Restoration Spain. It would be more correct to allude to the diffusion and fragmentation of elites who were fairly diverse. Neither is the subordination of politics to economic interests proven. It would be preferable to imagine a complex, everchanging and two-way relationship between economic and political power, which has been referred to as ‘reciprocal utilization’.41 Even when economic and political elites agreed, they used different and not necessarily related lines of reasoning, according to what was appropriate.42 In other words, the new political historians find themselves halfway between the two positions held up to now: one which completely separated political standpoints from economic pressures, and the other which stated that political standpoints depended on economic pressures. Whatever the truth, these works highlight the importance of the actions of certain individuals – eminent persons, notables and caciques – when trying to assess the presence and strength of political influences in stable cacique-dominated areas (cacicazgos), in spite of structural factors such as the level of illiteracy in each area.43 In these cacique-dominated areas, there were numerous kinship ties which bound the cacique elites together, so that frequently, one would look not to one

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individual but to an entire family to find the key to explaining political life in a specified area. The leadership of electoral constituencies and local parties was frequently inherited, the public and the private were not distinct spheres, and ‘inheritance, the legal mechanism which dictated the perpetuation of family socioeconomic supremacy, also dictated, although in an informal manner, political life’.44 The importance of family ties was such that some suggest the replacement of the term ‘political friends’, first used by Varela Ortega to characterize the epoch, with political families.45 The new political history has also taken a close look at parties and party clientelism. These authors have looked into government formations, which has corrected the previous imbalance in studies on the Restoration in favour of the forces of opposition – republicans, Catalan and Basque nationalists, and the workers’ movement. One of their most surprising conclusions relates to the organizational methods of conservatives and liberals. In many provinces, the parties were more than merely personal factions; they disposed of basic organizations, more developed than had been thought, made up of committees and clubs capable of maintaining a register of members and implementing election campaigns, apart from their corresponding press titles.46 In accordance with the predicted movement towards mass politics, the new political history has described the transformation of party cliques to clientelist parties, and it would be possible to claim that, rather than parties of notables in a strict sense, there were genuine parties of cadres in the dynastic ranks of the Restoration.47 However, all the authors share the same, widespread model in the study of Spanish caciquismo: that is, its conception as a framework based on clientele. The monarchical parties and some of the opposition, all more or less developed according to the region, can be thought of as pyramid structures of patrons and clients, nourished by the search for and granting of favours and recommendations. The same happened, at least until the first decades of the twentieth century, to liberals in Italy, but also to monarchists and republicans in Portugal, and governmental forces in Greece.48 Furthermore, as in those countries, this occurred within a political culture dominated by particularistic interests, more preoccupied with immediate benefits than with general ideological programmes, which had an effect on the elites as much as other sectors of a population that was not very interested in public affairs.49 Historians have also become interested in the nature and evolution of the political behaviour of the Spanish throughout the period of the Restoration. In this respect, the elections continued to represent an important role, but were considered a component in the overall dominant framework of elites and clientele. In other words, elections are treated as the culmination of a process when power

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relationships are exposed to daylight, but they are no longer treated as the only, and by no means the most important, object of study. Papers entirely dedicated to elections still appear, but they are in a minority. Nobody denies the importance of the authorities’ intervention in the encasillado: the officially-sanctioned vote, the electoral fraud organized from above, and so on, but the earlier insistence of works about the effect of caciquismo on electoral fraud and corruption (from the pucherazo or election rigging, to the purchase of votes) has given way to other explanations which highlight the influence of different client groups: victory in elections is simply another result of the distribution of resources among them. The adherents of the new political history do not limit themselves to describing the electoral processes, but insist instead on finding the ultimate source to explain the workings of this process. The key to how elections worked was often found in the different political apparatuses, formed almost always by client groups led by the aforementioned elites. It may, of course, have been a matter of economic incentives. Sometimes it was a question of paying off whoever controlled a decisive section of the labour market. For example, it occurred in the case of large landowning influences (as happened in the latifundista districts of Andalusia and La Mancha) and in the tenancy system which enabled improved control of the peasantry, such as in the orchards and market gardens of southeast Spain, where one could find something similar to the Italian mezzadria. It also occurred in industries, as in the mining companies throughout the country.50 On other occasions, the money involved in vote-buying was important, and this grew with time after the introduction of universal suffrage. However, the source of political influence, with or without financial backing, was especially connected to control of state resources, and was derived from acting as intermediaries in the process of giving access to these resources, both for individuals and communities. Accordingly, the Spanish cacique was remarkably similar to the notable who, acting as an intermediary or broker, was so crucial in other countries of southern Europe for the structuring of relationships between the citizens and the modern state, and, in general, for the organization of political affairs through clientelist methods.51 With time, and especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, political apparatuses for mobilizing the electorate with ideological arguments appeared and grew in the context of increasingly competitive elections. Some of these political parties obtained a great deal of influence, and even power, in some town and city halls, such as the republicans in numerous cities, from Coruña to Málaga and from Gijón to Cartagena. This could be seen as a precedent for the triumph of the left which materialized with the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931. Some of these organizations obtained representation in Parliament and a

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leading role in national politics: the republicans – above all the radicals in Barcelona and Valencia – the Catalan and Basque nationalists, and socialists.52 One should also mention the Carlists and traditionalists, who, in some regions where they had a strong social base such as the Basque Country or Navarre, encouraged modern political behaviour.53 These parties gathered support with election propaganda and the construction of a collective identity by using the press, associations, clubs, cultural institutes or party offices, cultural activities and entertainment, symbols and rituals. Those parties could easily be compared to the leftist working-class movements or the right-wing nationalist and Catholic parties that developed in Western Europe during the same period, and which saw the arrival of the masses in the political arena (although in the Spanish case, it took longer than other countries).54 However, these modern methods did not prevent the frequent recurrence of cacique-inspired methods, from fraud to administrative favours, whenever a political party dominated a particular branch of power. Mixed political apparatuses, such as the reformist republicans in Asturias or the regionalists in Catalonia, who combined modern political activities in the cities with the promotion of caciquismo in rural areas, were quite common. 3.2 Agrarian social history Alongside the new political history, another interpretative theory of caciquismo has emerged in recent years, defended up until now by minority sectors of Spanish historiography, and which could be given the generic name of agrarian social history. According to one of its most outstanding adepts, it has three main distinguishing features. First, it took the step from ‘macroanalysis to an appreciation of microanalysis’ through which the ‘great politico-electoral processes gave way, in part because they were already analysed, to an ever greater interest in the scope of local community and rural politics’. Attention therefore centres on the rural locality, where the political influences of public and private actors, especially over local rule, are evaluated. The second distinction is the essential ‘use in historiographical methods of new tools, suited to microanalysis, which originated in disciplines such as social anthropology’. Confronted by the use in new political history of concepts originating in political science and sociology, agrarian social history makes use of anthropology, a discipline with far more experience than the others in the study of rural communities, despite the undoubted preference for Marxist schools of anthropology. The final distinguishing feature is ‘the influx of the analyses of caciquismo by historians coming from traditions and fields different from genuine political history’, predominantly authors that have studied the agrarian economy and society. This, therefore, has led to a ‘renewed socioeconomic vision’ of the cacique-dominated world.55

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This interpretation tries to discredit the ‘top-down model’ of new political history in favour of an approach starting at the bottom, examining the phenomenon from the lowest viewpoint. At the same time, it attempts to figure out the relationships between economic power and political power at the local level with a more in-depth analysis, arguing that these relationships have not been sufficiently explained by those who have fallen for reductionist politico-administrative arguments. In brief, caciquismo is explained by the strategies of economic production and social reproduction of the local oligarchies which benefited from it, especially the agrarian oligarchies, and for this reason an essentially socio-economic function is attributed to the phenomenon. There is nothing new in this argument, apart from its distinctive language; it revives old theories, to a greater or lesser extent coloured by Marxism, about the predominance of a landowning oligarchy which used the apparatus of caciquismo to perpetuate its hegemony (what is now called ‘social reproduction’). However, agrarian social history does not make a case for the exceptional nature of Spanish caciquismo; it claims instead that there are similar mechanisms of political and social mediation in many other rural societies before the arrival of the politics of the masses. The research of these historians has produced material on two closely related fields of study: local power and rural elites. The analysis of town councils has revealed the socio-economical and professional characteristics of their members, town councillors and mayors. These characteristics confirm the perpetuation in power of the biggest contributors from each locality, whose wealth came from the land. Put another way, these works have shown how access to local power in liberal Spain was determined by class influence. The rural oligarchies used municipal influence to control crucial elements in the life of rural communities, like most of the taxes, recruitment for military service, the distribution of water for irrigation, the administration of communal goods – often privatized by these oligarchies – and the judicial apparatus, which allowed them to contain and repress the protests of the subordinate classes. Moreover, local authorities served to regulate economic changes in the country, keeping them in the control of those with power. Furthermore, clientelist practices between landowners and peasants led to a big increase in electoral fraud, which in turn helped keep landowners in positions of power.56 However, some historians have introduced nuances in this monolithic image, indicating that the system did not remain immobile. In many places, the local institutions experienced harsh political conflicts between rival factions, and the existence of legal mechanisms of representation – like universal male suffrage as of 1890 – made it possible for neighbours that were not part of the rural elite to end up in positions of power, something that occurred frequently as the politicization of the country advanced. In addition, local leaders, beyond look-

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ing after their own fortunes, looked for legitimacy by representing the general interests of their respective communities.57 There have recently been many studies of the rural elite, both small local dignitaries and big family owners. In these studies, politics appears to be of secondary importance; attention is centred on the economic management of agricultural wealth and on family strategies – marriages, inheritances, etc. – applied to preserve and increase this wealth. The political prominence of the rural elite is conceived as an almost automatic consequence of their relevant social position. However, there are some aspects of these studies that fully affect the conceptualization of the political system, as the in-breeding of the oligarchies transferred to public institutions and their influence on the local level was reinforced thanks to their political contacts on the national level. These studies have also pointed out differences among the rural elite with respect to their ideological or party affiliations: the landowning nobility usually attached themselves to the most conservative sectors, while medium-sized owners aligned themselves with progressive sectors, and so on. In the same way, the analysis of the rural elite has detected continuities and breaks between the old regime and the liberal era, and highlighted the renewal of the elites. This renewal led to the processes of disentailment and commercialization of ecclesiastical, municipal and nobiliary wealth in the middle of the nineteenth century.58 As occurred in other regions of southern Europe like Sicily, agricultural reforms produced the emergence of new elites in several Spanish regions. These new elites came from groups previously subordinated to the aristocracy, although in some cases, they managed to marry into it.59 The period of the Restoration marked the height of power of these liberal elites. In general, social agrarian history rejects the supposed failure of the liberal-bourgeois revolution on Spanish soil and goes on to underline – unlike its Marxist antecedents in the 1960s and 1970s – its complete dominance in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, this dominance was achieved in an agrarian and not an industrial society, and was built upon the decaying feudal remains of the ancien régime. There are constructive elements in this position, such as the inclusion of caciquismo within other spheres of social life, the examination of the development of economic relationships in rural areas, and the historiographical interest in family strategies and the political culture of small farmers. Peasants and small farmers, who formed the bulk of the Spanish population at the time of the Restoration, were not mere passive spectators in the structure of caciques, but actively took part in its operation according to their own outlook and concerns for survival, with the aim of improving their living conditions. However, the adepts of social agrarian history could justifiably be criticized. First, their treatment of

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the issue is excessively biased and limited, and almost always confined to what happened in some small localities and to some specific social groups. Second, they rather rashly criticize other historians of caciquismo, accusing them of denying the links between economy and politics.60 As pointed out before, this is not the case for the new political history, which deals with those links and tries to explain them. 3.3 Shared conclusions Despite the differences amongst the interpretations outlined above, it is possible to speak of some conclusions which are shared by both of them. Both begin by demonstrating the multiple communication channels which linked political influence and economic interests in the Restoration, although there are significant nuances between their respective positions. In general, the new political history recognizes the importance of economic and social factors, but continues to give prime importance to the control of public institutions and concedes a selfsufficient logic to the world of politics, which is the central nucleus of its analysis and the viewpoint from which other variables are considered. It strongly challenges the conclusions of the political history school of the 1970s, but does not completely reject it. On the other hand, the agrarian approach continues to give priority to economic and social conditions over political factors; as a result, it is largely in agreement with earlier Marxist positions and leaves politics in a secondary and subordinate position. With regard to the mechanisms of representation, in one way or another both emphasize the ties of politicians to their local communities, and to the defence of certain interests which often coincided with their own. Members of parliament, for example, were linked to the areas they represented by numerous economic, professional, family and clientelist ties. Organizations such as chambers of commerce, trade associations, local banks or bar associations played a fundamental role in these connections together with local institutions. Even socializing at casinos and clubs, and religious events like those organized by guilds for Holy Week, played a part in these connections. What is more, these same MPs spent their time acting as intermediaries with central state power in Madrid, which could be conceived as a political market where local sectors negotiated competitively.61 A substantial part of this work was carried out in Parliament, which was not a defunct organ of the state but exercised significant functions in the political regime of the constitutional monarchy.62 Therefore, one is obliged to conclude that the artificial nature of Restoration political life, in the way it was condemned by the intellectuals of the day and by some subsequent historians, remains questionable. ‘Official Spain’ was not so far from ‘actual Spain’, and many genuine

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interests were satisfied by means of the clientelist channels which the government parties provided. In one way or another, both historical approaches emphasize the influence of local elites throughout the political system, and this serves to correct the traditional stress that historiography had placed on the predominance of central power. As has occurred in Italy, the attention of historians has moved from the centre to the periphery.63 Both approaches speak of the need for national leaders to negotiate with those who held power in each region, in all areas of policy and especially at election time, in order to successfully implement the government’s plans, such as the encasillado. In this respect, the analysis of socalled cunerismo,64 or the appearance of MPs without clear links to their constituencies, has shown that it was far less frequent than previously supposed. Cunerismo was frequently connected to the influence of a local notable, who placed the cunero in question and offered him the supporters required for victory in exchange for useful connections in Madrid. In the politics of the day, the case for defending what was called ‘the moral and material interests’ of each district, and the demands of the most organized sectors of public opinion, found a suitable framework in arguments based on local affairs.65 In general, this research emphasizes the role of the province as the most important level of political and social life in Spain until the twentieth century, and helps to counterbalance the traditional vision of relationships between centre and periphery in modern Spain – something that has been also emphasized by historians of Spanish nationalist movements.66 Furthermore, over time local powers grew to the detriment of central power, and this was especially so after the introduction of universal suffrage from 1890 and, still more, with the irreversible fragmentation of political parties from 1913 onwards. The crisis of monarchical groups obliged Spanish politicians to look for security in a guaranteed local power base in order not to be swept away by the instability of the government. One indicator of this phenomenon is found in the increase in the number of constituencies which were ‘owned’ (distritos propios): constituencies which continually elected the same candidate or MPs from the same party or clientele. The scale of this practice naturally depends on what is understood by such a phenomenon, but is usually confirmed by the aforementioned works. Of course, the government could not orchestrate elections as easily in 1918 as it could in 1879, when the Minister of the Interior communicated to provincial governors the list of names of government candidates imposed on constituencies a short while before the elections. In fact, from 1918 onwards, it became very difficult to achieve a parliamentary majority. There are a few voices who insist on the large presence of distritos propios at the beginning of the

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Restoration and their gradual decline in favour of central power.67 However, the main consensus on these issues obliges one to question the idea that during the Restoration the executive almost always got its way, that there existed an ejecutivitis invasoris which José Varela Ortega spoke of in his last works.68 The new historiography has rejected the idea that caciquismo was merely a symptom of the persistence of the old regime or of perennial Spanish backwardness, and now it tends to view it as a combination of mechanisms that helped Spanish society adapt to the political changes originated by the liberal revolution. In short, historians of one or another school now agree on rejecting simplistic judgements, and prefer to stress the complexity of political life in Restoration Spain, with its multiple local and regional variations and its considerable differences between rural areas and cities, where traditional methods and modern political behaviour coexisted at the heart of a continuously evolving system.

4. Future Perspectives The current state of research outlined in this article gives an idea as to the potential or necessary paths for historiographical analysis on Spanish caciquismo in the near future. In the first place, it would be a good idea to cover areas and epochs which have hardly been touched up to now, like the political behaviour of the cities, outlined in some research.69 The public life of Barcelona, Valencia and Gijón after the new century was ushered in has been studied quite thoroughly, above all through the political movements – republican and nationalist – which transformed the electoral landscape, but there are a few papers dedicated to other important urban areas, especially Madrid, whose leading role as the national capital was combined with an unexpected abundance of client networks and political associations.70 It is also necessary, and even more urgent than the previous study, to look outside the period of the Restoration. One must go backwards to analyse the rest of the nineteenth century.71 One must also go forwards to verify whether Restoration caciquismo actually survived, and the extent to which it was politically important under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the democratic regime of the Second Republic and even during the beginning of Franco’s regime.72 In this manner, the tendency to view caciquismo as a long-term phenomenon would gather strength.73 With regard to the search for new investigative approaches, it is legitimate to make a case for a sort of social history of political power which, apart from the factors examined up to now, would include basic elements of culture. It is necessary to figure out the mentality of a people who made caciquismo such a dynamic and lasting force. This could be done by studying sources of literature and

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folklore.74 Perhaps, too, it would be most effective to re-examine other elements of political culture, such as the rhetoric which accompanied the traditions of caciquismo, the use of symbols and the language of caciquismo, the use of rituals – banquets, festivals, electoral visits and ceremonies – and places such as casinos and political clubs, in a singular universe which was decisive in the development of modern Spain.75 Lastly, it would be worthwhile to make the connections between the conclusions about politics at a local or provincial level with the development of national politics. In this way, studies about caciquismo would add their bit to an understanding of the Restoration crisis (1917–23), and to the debate on the possibilities of democratizing that political system, a controversy which has continued since the famous assertion of Raymond Carr about general Primo de Rivera as a strangler of a newborn (parliamentary democracy) in the 1923 coup d’état.76 We have a great deal of information about the loss of supremacy of the dynastic parties to the benefit of democratic forces in some regions and cities, but we know little about the underlying continuity of cacique domination in the greater part of the country until 1923. We know about the increase in distritos propios at the time the political parties fragmented, the latter being more complex and representative than was first realized. But we have not succeeded in establishing whether or not the caciquismo-based Restoration regime was on the road to democracy when Primo de Rivera and King Alfonso XIII decided to destroy it. Notes 1. R. Carr, ‘Democracy’s Long Siesta’, The Times Literary Supplement, Vol. 5019 (11 June 1999), 6. 2. Rui Ramos, A segunda fundaçao (1890–1926), História de Portugal Vol. 6 (Lisbon 2001). J-L. Briquet, ‘Les infortunes de la vertu. La critique des moeurs parlementaires en Italie (1860–1890)’, in Jean-Louis Briquet and Fréderic Sawicki (eds), Le clientélisme politique dans les sociétés contemporaines (Paris 1998), 251–76. L. Musella, ‘Clientelismo, sistema politico e parlamento nell’analisi dei commentatori del tempo’, in Luigi Musella, Individui, amici, clienti. Relazioni personali e circuiti politici in Italia meridionale tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna 1994), 197–216. 3. Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel, Gumersindo de Azcárate. Biografía intelectual (Valladolid 2005). 4. Marco Minghetti, I partiti politici e la loro ingerenza nella giustizia e nell’amministrazione (Bologna 1881). 5. Gumersindo de Azcárate, El régimen parlamentario en la práctica (Madrid 1885, 1978), 83. 6. A prestigious and influential cultural institute in Madrid which enjoyed its heyday in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 7. Joaquín Costa, Oligarquía y caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España: urgencia y modo de cambiarla (Madrid 1902, 1975), I, 16.

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 European History Quarterly, . 8. Costa, op. cit., 8. 9. J. Ortega y Gasset, ‘Vieja y nueva política’ (1914), in José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas (Madrid 1983), I, 267–99 (274). 10. M. Azaña, ‘Caciquismo y democracia’ (1923), in Manuel Azaña, Obras Completas (Mexico 1966), I, 471–4. 11. María Teresa González Calvet, La Dictadura de Primo de Rivera. El Directorio Militar (Madrid 1987), 263–5. Eduardo González Calleja, La España de Primo de Rivera. La modernización autoritaria, 1923–1930 (Madrid 2005). 12. Jaume Vicens Vives (ed.), Historia social y económica de España y América, V. Los siglos XIX y XX (Barcelona 1957, 1985). 13. M. Suárez Cortina, ‘La Restauración (1875–1900) y el fin del imperio colonial. Un balance historiográfico’, in Manuel Suárez Cortina, (ed.), La Restauración, entre el liberalismo y la democracia (Madrid 1997), 31–107. 14. A. Garrido Martín, ‘Historiografía sobre el caciquismo: balance y perspectivas’, Hispania, Vol. 176 (1990), 1349–60. 15. R. Herr, ‘Spain’, in David Spring (ed.), European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD 1977), 98–126. 16. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal carcere (Turin 1948–1951). Tommaso Detti and Giovanni Gozzini (eds), Ernesto Ragionieri e la storiografia del dopoguerra (Milan 2001). 17. M. Tuñón de Lara, ‘La burguesía y la formación del bloque de poder oligárquico (1875–1914)’, in Manuel Tuñón de Lara, Estudios sobre el siglo XIX español (Madrid 1972, 1984), 155–238. 18. Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo XIX (Barcelona 1960), 2, 44–5. 19. A. Ortí, ‘Estudio introductorio’, Costa, op. cit., xix–cclxxxvii. 20. S. Juliá, ‘Anomalía, dolor y fracaso de España’, Claves de Razón Práctica, Vol. 66 (1996), 10–21. 21. P. Corner, ‘The Road to Fascism: An Italian Sonderweg?’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 11, 2 (2002), 273–295. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (New York 1984). 22. ‘El caciquismo’, Revista de Occidente, Vol. 127 (1973). José Varela Ortega, Los amigos políticos. Partidos, elecciones y caciquismo en la Restauración (1875–1900) (Madrid 1977). Javier Tusell, Oligarquía y caciquismo en Andalucía (1890–1923) (Barcelona 1976). 23. Varela Ortega, op. cit., 366 & 388. 24. Ibid. 25. Among the works that inspired Spanish historians, the following can be cited: Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London 1961); Theodore Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III (London 1958); and A. Lyttelton, ‘El patronazgo en la Italia de Giolitti’, Revista de Occidente, Vol. 127 (1973), 94–117. 26. Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1975 (Oxford 1982). This possibility has been explored by F. del Rey Reguillo, ‘¿Qué habría sucedido si Alfonso XIII hubiera rechazado el golpe de Primo de Rivera en 1923?’, in Nigel Townson (ed.), Historia virtual de España, 1870–2004 (Madrid 2004), 93–137. 27. J. Tusell, ‘El sufragio universal en España (1891–1936): un balance historiográfico’, Ayer, Vol. 3 (1991), 13–62. 28. Alicia Yanini, El caciquisme (Valencia 1984). Luis Castells, Modernización y dinámica política de la sociedad guipuzcoana de la Restauración, 1876–1915 (Madrid 1987). 29. T. Carnero Arbat, ‘Democratización limitada y deterioro político en España, 1874–1930’, in

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30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Salvador Forner Muñoz (coord.), Democracia, elecciones y modernización en Europa, siglos XIX y XX (Madrid 1997), 203–39. Carlos Dardé, La aceptación del adversario. Política y políticos de la Restauración (1875–1900) (Madrid 2003). See, as an example, María Jesús González Hernández, El universo conservador de Antonio Maura. Biografía y proyecto de Estado (Madrid 1997), and Javier Moreno Luzón, Romanones. Caciquismo y política liberal (Madrid 1998). José Varela Ortega (ed.), El poder de la influencia. Geografía del caciquismo en España (1875–1923) (Madrid 2001). J. Moreno Luzón, ‘Teoría del clientelismo y estudio de la política caciquil’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, Vol. 89 (1995), 191–224. Antonio Robles Egea (ed.), Política en penumbra. Patronazgo y clientelismo político en la España contemporánea (Madrid 1996). Giampiero Carocci, Il trasformismo dall’unità ad oggi (Milan 1992). M. Suárez Cortina, ‘Trasformismo y turno: dos versiones latinas de la política liberal europea de la “Belle Époque”’, in Susana Casmirri and Manuel Suárez Cortina (eds), La Europa del Sur en la época liberal. España, Italia y Portugal. Una perspectiva comparada (Santander 1998), 225–49. For Italy, see Fulvio Cammarano, Storia politica dell’Italia liberale 1861–1900 (Bari 1999). G. Ranzato, ‘Le elezioni nei sistemi liberali italiano e spagnolo’, Rivista di Storia Contemporanea, Vol. 2 (1989), 244–63. R. Camurri, ‘La Italia liberal y la España de la Restauración: una perspectiva comparada’, in Rosa Ana Gutiérrez, Rafael Zurita and Renato Camurri, (eds), Elecciones y cultura política en España e Italia (1890–1923) (Valencia 2003), 15–32. F. Gómez Ochoa, ‘Democratización y crisis del liberalismo en Italia: análisis y aplicación al caso español’, and S. Casmirri, ‘Crisi del parlamento e crisi del sistema liberale in Italia e in Spagna’, in Manuel Suárez Cortina (ed.), La crisis del Estado liberal en la Europa del Sur (Santander 2000), 79–108 and 109–46. Pedro Carasa (ed.), Elites castellanas de la Restauración. II. Una aproximación al poder político en Castilla (Salamanca 1997). M. Martí, ‘Las diputaciones provinciales en la trama caciquil: un ejemplo castellonense durante los primeros años de la Restauración’, Hispania, Vol. 51 (1991), 993–1041. ‘El poder local en la España contemporánea’, Hispania, Vol. 59 (1999), 7–111. Pedro Carasa (ed.), El poder local en Castilla. Estudios sobre su ejercicio durante la Restauración (1874–1923) (Valladolid 2003). Carasa (ed.), op. cit. (1997), II, 79. Mercedes Cabrera and Fernando del Rey Reguillo, El poder de los empresarios. Política e intereses económicos en la España contemporánea (1875–2000) (Madrid 2002). María Sierra, La política del pacto. El sistema de la Restauración a través del Partido Conservador sevillano (1874–1923) (Seville 1996). ‘Clientelas, caciquismo y poder en la Restauración’, Historia Social, Vol. 36 (2000). F. Sánchez Marroyo, ‘Extremadura’, in Varela Ortega (ed.), op. cit., 332–33. Carasa (ed.), op. cit. (1997), II, 71. Rafael Zurita Aldeguer, Notables, políticos y clientes. La política conservadora en Alicante. 1875–1898 (Alicante 1996). María Antonia Peña Guerrero, Clientelismo político y poderes periféricos durante la Restauración. Huelva 1874–1923 (Huelva 1998).

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 European History Quarterly, . 48. Luigi Graziano, Clientelismo e sistema politico. Il caso dell’Italia (Milan 1980). Pedro Tavares de Almeida, Eleiçoes e caciquismo no Portugal oitocentista, 1868–1890 (Lisbon 1991). Fernando Farelo Lopes, Poder político e caciquismo na 1ª República portuguesa (Lisbon 1993). George T. Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republic. Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece 1922–1936 (Berkeley, CA 1983). 49. Moreno Luzón, op. cit. (1995). There is a discussion of this vision of clientelism, seen as ‘culturalist’ by some authors: see Simona Piatoni (ed.), Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation (Cambridge 2001). 50. A. Yanini, ‘Funcionamiento del sistema político y estructura del poder rural en la sociedad española de la Restauración (1874–1902)’, Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia Contemporánea, Vol. 7 (1989–90), 25–36. M.A. Peña, ‘Caciquismo y poder empresarial. El papel político de las compañías mineras en la provincia de Huelva (1898–1923)’, Trocadero, Vol. 5 (1993), 299–324. On mezzadria and clientelism, see Sydel F. Silverman, Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town (New York 1975), and Frank Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany 1919–1922 (Cambridge 1989). 51. Barnett Singer, Village Notables in Nineteenth-Century France. Priest, Mayors, Schoolmasters (Albany 1983). Luigi Ponziani (ed.), Le Italie dei notabili: il punto della situazione (Ercolano 2000). 52. On republicans, see, for example, Fernando Arcas Cubero, El republicanismo malagueño durante la Restauración (Cordoba 1985); Pamela B. Radcliff, From Mobilization to Civil War. The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge 1996); Ramiro Reig, Blasquistas y clericales. La lucha por la ciudad en la Valencia de 1900 (Valencia 1986); and José Álvarez Junco, El Emperador del Paralelo. Lerroux y la demagogia populista (Madrid 1990). Nationalists, in Borja de Riquer i Permanyer, Escolta Espanya. La cuestión catalana en la época liberal (Madrid 2001); and Santiago de Pablo, Ludger Mees and José A. Rodríguez Ranz, El péndulo patriótico. Historia del Partido Nacionalista Vasco, I.1895–1936 (Barcelona 1999); Socialists, in Santos Juliá, Los socialistas en la política española, 1879–1982 (Madrid 1996). 53. María del Mar Larraza, Aprendiendo a ser ciudadanos. Retrato socio-político de Pamplona, 1890–1923 (Pamplona 1997). 54. Paolo Pombeni (ed.), La trasformazione politica nell’Europa liberale 1870–1890 (Bologna 1986). 55. S. Cruz Artacho, ‘Clientes, clientelas y política en la España de la Restauración’, Ayer, Vol. 36 (1999), 105–129 (115). 56. M. González de Molina, ‘La funcionalidad de los poderes locales en la economía orgánica’, Noticiario de Historia Agraria, Vol. 6 (1993), 9–25. Salvador Cruz Artacho, Caciques y campesinos. Poder político, modernización agraria y conflictividad rural en Granada, 1890–1923 (Madrid 1994). 57. Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, Aurora Artiaga Rego, and Xesús Balboa (eds), Poder local, elites e cambio social na Galicia non urbana (1874–1936) (Santiago de Compostela 1997). I. Moll and P. Salas, ‘Las pequeñas élites agrarias y su participación en la vida política durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’, Ayer, Vol. 48 (2002), 159–83. 58. María Dolores Muñoz Dueñas (ed.), ‘Las élites agrarias en la Península Ibérica’, Ayer, Vol. 48 (2002), 9–221. Jesús Millán García-Varela, El poder de la tierra. La sociedad agraria del Bajo Segura en la época del liberalismo 1830–1890 (Alicante 1999). Rosa María Almansa Pérez, Familia, tierra y poder en la Córdoba de la Restauración (Cordoba 2005).

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Luzón: Political Clientelism, Elites, and Caciquismo in Restoration Spain  59. L. Riall, ‘Elites in Search of Authority: Political Power and Social Order in nineteenth century Sicily’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 55 (2003), 25–46. 60. Cruz Artacho, op. cit. (1999). 61. R. López Blanco, ‘Madrid’, in Varela Ortega (ed.), op. cit., 383–419. 62. Mercedes Cabrera (ed.), Con luz y taquígrafos. El Parlamento en la Restauración (1913–1923) (Madrid 1998). 63. Rafaele Romanelli, Il comando imposibile. Stato e società nell’Italia liberale (Bologna 1988). 64. From cuna (cradle), referring to the MP’s origin. 65. See, for example, Aurora Garrido Martín, Favor e indiferencia. Caciquismo y vida política en Cantabria (1902–1923) (Santander 1998), and X. R. Veiga Alonso, ‘Clientelismo e historia política: algunas puntualizaciones sobre viejos temas’, Spagna Contemporanea, Vol. 18 (2000), 91–108. 66. See, for example, Juan Pablo Fusi, España, La evolución de la identidad nacional (Madrid 2000). 67. J. Pro Ruiz, ‘Caciquismo y manipulación electoral en la España de la Restauración (1890–1907)’, in Rafael Sánchez Mantero (ed.), En torno al 98. España en el tránsito del siglo XIX al XX (Seville 2000), I, 197–208. 68. José Varela Ortega and Luis Medina Peña, Elecciones, alternancia y democracia. EspañaMéxico, una reflexión comparativa (Madrid 2000). 69. S. Forner Muñoz, M. García Andreu, R. A. Gutiérrez Lloret and R. Zurita Aldeguer, ‘Modernización social y comportamiento urbano en España, 1910–1923’, in Forner, op. cit., 241–93. 70. J. Moreno Luzón, ‘Madrid, de la política de notables a la política de masas’, in Adolfo Carrasco, José Luis García Delgado, Santos Juliá y Javier Moreno Luzón (eds), Madrid. Tres siglos de una capital (Madrid 2002), 169–88. 71. Xosé R. Veiga Alonso, O Conde de Pallares e o seu tempo 1828–1908. Aproximación o activismo das elites na Galicia decimonónica (Lugo 1999). M. Caballero Domínguez and C. Romero Salvador, ‘Oligarquía y caciquismo durante el reinado de Isabel II (1833–1868)’, Historia Agraria, Vol. 38 (2006), 7–26. 72. Emilio Grandío Seoane, Caciquismo e eleccións na Galiza da II República (Vigo 1999). Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, Las políticas de la victoria. La consolidación del Nuevo Estado franquista (1938–1953) (Madrid 2000). 73. Robles Egea, op. cit. 74. Isabel Peñarrubia, Carnaval, condolades i teatre popular. La dissidència a la Mallorca caciquista (1875–1923) (Palma 1999). 75. Some hints of this are found in María Dolores Jiménez Martínez, Favores e intereses. Política de clientelas y cultura electoral en Almería (1903–1923) (Jaen 2003). 76. Carr, op. cit.

javier moreno-luzón is a lecturer in History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Deputy Director of the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales (Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies). He is the author of several works on the political life of modern Spain, such as Romanones. Caciquismo y política liberal (Madrid 1998), Alfonso XIII. Un político en el trono (Madrid 2003), and Progresistas. Biografías de reformistas españoles, 1808–1939 (Madrid 2006).