When Movements Change Policies: Popular Legislative Initiatives in Favor of Housing Rights in Spain

Abstract

The Spanish housing rights movement has been consistently demanding new regulations of the housing sector. In addition to protests, it has campaigned for popular legislative initiatives (PLI) that have generated different outcomes. How can we account for such variation? To address this question, this article compares three PLI campaigns for housing rights: the national PLI (2011–2013), the Catalan PLI (2014–2015), and the Madrid PLI (2017). Whereas the three PLIs collected enough signatures to be submitted to congress, only two managed to pass the first stage of the legislative process, and only one was eventually turned into law. This study argues that these legislative outcomes must be unpacked and disaggregated into concatenations of stages that were shaped by three processes: coalition building, salience building, and legitimacy building. It uses a process tracing method to show empirically how these dynamics unfolded in the three abovementioned PLIs.