«Rotten boroughs» and democratization. The municipal elections of April of 1933

Abstract

Until 1979, the local elections of April 1933 were the last of a democratic nature to be held in Spain. Their importance is determined, moreover, for being the most sincere expression of rural democracy, which had previously been mediated by mechanisms such as «the encasillado» and Article 29 of the electoral act of 1907. In this article we analyze these elections, which until now lacked an overall treatment, using not only secondary sources or press, but also official papers. With these documents, we were able to reconstruct electoral results that were, up until then, still incomplete and fragmentary. Our goal is to measure the degree of politicization of a significant sample of the rural electorate in the 30´s, after half a century of representative liberal regime, through the reconstruction of the process leading to these elections, the organization of political parties in rural towns and the correlation of forces due to alliances, the nature of the propaganda used and the presence of vote-distorting elements (governmental intervention, political violence, etcetera). Another point of focus is whether this politicization tended to consolidate the foundations of the current constitutional model and the ruling coalition or, on the contrary, if it was a reactive phenomenon, carried out by forces of the opposition, both republican and conservative. In general, after the reconstruction of the final results and considering nuances, this text leans more towards the second interpretation, although the intensity varied from one region to another.