The Book
The Book Project
A monograph on the electoral behaviour of the Second Republic
An early democracy at the ballot box
Spain, 1931–1936
Why do some early democratic regimes collapse while others survive? This book argues that the answer lies not only in structural conditions — socioeconomic development, institutional design, or elite commitment — but in how political competition actively transforms social divisions into destabilising conflicts.
Drawing on the classic cleavage framework of Lipset and Rokkan, the book identifies four salient fault lines in the Spanish Second Republic: the religious cleavage (secular versus Catholic visions of the state), the agrarian cleavage (landowners versus landless labourers), the territorial cleavage between centre and periphery, and emerging class divisions. These divisions are treated as latent potential: their political consequences depend on how parties and elites choose to mobilise them.
The book combines electoral data at the municipal level, institutional variation, elite discourse from parliamentary speeches, and episodes of contention to show that polarisation is constructed — through discourse, strategy, and institutional feedback — rather than given by structure alone. Early democracies do not fail simply because societies are divided, but because political competition transforms those divisions into conflicts the democratic system can no longer contain.