The Left Divided: Parties, Unions, and the Resolution of Southern Spain's Agrarian Social Question

Sara Watson
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Sara Watson: University of California, Berkeley, watson.584@osu.edu

Politics & Society, 2008, vol. 36, issue 4, 451-477

Abstract: This article challenges dominant explanations in the comparative political economy literature on the origins and purposes of social protection. Far from being a tool of working-class mobilization, social protection in southern Spain was strategically employed by a left party to politically demobilize its supposedly “natural†constituencies. This peculiar outcome is the result of a setting that is common in welfare states outside of northern Europe: the context of a divided left, in which parties and unions are seeking to mobilize different constituencies and in which left parties are themselves divided between moderate and far-left groups. The result in Spain was that social policy became a weapon in parties' efforts to undermine their political competition. This suggests the need to rethink the received wisdom about what the welfare state does to build working-class power in the context of a divided left.

Keywords: welfare state; left parties; unions; demobilization; social democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:36:y:2008:i:4:p:451-477

DOI: 10.1177/0032329208324708

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