The Spanish Constitution of 1978 has not been reformed during its thirty years of existence, apart from one minor retouch in 1992 to recognize the right of nationals of European Union member states to vote in local authority elections.
There has therefore been no formal reform of the Spanish Constitution concerning the territorial power structure. But this does not mean that this structure, only partially designed by the Spanish Constitution, has not been completed, made concrete, or specified in more detail, and adapted during the past three decades, both from the “top down” (i.e., by the central government and central institutions1 and at the impetus of Spanish-wide parties – more precisely, of these parties’ central organs or authorities) and also from the “bottom up” (usually by nationalist parties and the territorial branches of the Spanish-wide parties).
These changes have been brought about by various processes, including not only through reforms of the autonomous communities’ constitutions (the so-called statutes of autonomy) and other legal reforms, but also through precedents created by the repeated exercise of political power, even when those actions have not been translated into formal legal rules.This chapter focuses on bottom-up “structural” changes introduced in the Spanish constitutional rules regulating the organization of territorial power, and particularly but not exclusively on those changes derived from the statutes of autonomy. This choice of focus is based on the potentially crucial role that statutes of autonomy will have in the reform of Spain’s Constitution, a role that, from a comparative perspective, contrasts remarkably with that held by state constitutions in federal systems. In this sense and in sharp contrast with the other chapters of this book, this chapter does not focus on bottom-up changes instigated in the “material” content of the Spanish Constitution, nor on policies of the central government linked to the development of new rights. This is because these sorts of changes have not been of great importance in Spain, given (until recently) both the absence of bills of rights in the statutes of autonomy of the autonomous communities and the autonomous communities’ limited capacity to establish truly autonomous public policies.
It is true that autonomous-community policies have on occasion provoked changes in central-government policies. For example, autonomous-community legislation took the lead in regulating same-sex unions, and only thereafter did the Spanish Parliament introduce similar regulations. And with regard to the “right to receive appropriate treatment of pain and complete palliative attention and undergo the process of death with dignity,” the autonomous communities also led the way. Yet these autonomous-community initiatives were legislative, not included in the statutes of autonomy, and therefore they fall outside the focus of this chapter. It may be that things will change in the future, since the new statutes of autonomy have incorporated bills of rights and have tended to strengthen the political capacity of the autonomous communities, but at this point it is too early to tell.The first section of this chapter describes the difficulties experienced in attempting to reform the Spanish Constitution in order to adapt the system of territorial organization to developments during the last thirty years. The second section analyses reforms in the statutes of autonomy, especially those initiated in 2003. The third section considers alternative processes for changing the system of political decentralization from the bottom up. Finally, the fourth section addresses the relationship between these bottom-up changes and federal asymmetry.