Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia

When thinking about transitions to democracy tending to assume that what is challenged is the nondemocratic regime and that with democracy a new legitimate system is established. However, in many countries the crisis of the nondemocratic regime is also intermixed with profound differences about what should actually constitute the “state.” The neglect in the literature of the question of the legitimacy of the state is unfortunate because this variable, while not always of great importance for nondemocratic polities, is of fundamental theoretical and political importance for democracy. The degree to which inhabitants accept the domain and scope of a territorial unit as an appropriate entity to make legitimate decisions about its possible future restructuring is thus a key variable for democratic theory. It is now becoming fashionable to see the Spanish consolidation as being almost overdetermined due to its supportive socioeconomic and geopolitical context.