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OCR
JULIO PONCE ALBERCA This view entailed certain contradictions, as the deficiencies of the Spanish state were notin fact especiallyintensein regions asadvancedandindustrialized as Catalonia and the Basque Country. Rather, the administration faced large problems throughout the entire country, and especially at the local level. In the seventies, local councils not only remained unrepresentative bodies, but were also nowhere near being able to satisfy citizens’ need for public services’. Nor had the administrative reforms of the fifties and sixties led to any significant degree of satisfaction®. Nowadays, we are better able to examine precisely how Spanish citizens view the administration thanks to the Spanish Agency for the Evaluation of Public Policies (Agencia Estatal de Evaluaciôn y Calidad), the Centre for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociolégicas) or think-tanks such as the Elcano Royal Institute’. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the period we hope to examine. This requires us to turn to two key written sources, namely the press and books published on the topic. A combination of the two provides an insight into Spaniards’ perceptions regarding the functioning of state institutions. The vicissitudes of the nineteenth-century Spanish state-building process are well known, and they left a serious imprint on the following century’. Not only was the resulting administrative structure weak — additionally, the lack of political stability hindered any consolidation of the political regime until at least the Canovas Restoration of 1876. To be sure, the state had a healthy number of civil servants and was to some extent comparable to its European counterparts’, but it was no less evident that its action was uneven in its effectiveness and intensity, its presence more tenuous in certain areas of the country’s complex geography. Antonio Martinez Marin: La representatividad municipal espanola: historia legislativa y régimen vigente, Murcia, Universidad, 1989. Luis Fernando Crespo Montes: Las reformas de la administraciôn española, 1957-1967, Madrid, CEPC, 2000. Regarding the Elcano Royal Institute: http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/portal/rielcano_es/contenido? WCM _ GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/elcano/elcano_es/zonas_es/demografia+y+poblacion/ari502016-gonzalezenriquez-declive-identidad-nacional-espanola, See also: Eloisa Del Pino Matute (ed.): La Administracion Publica a juicio de los ciudadanos: Satisfacciön con los servicios, valoraciön del gasto, confianza en los empleados püblicos y actitudes hacia la e-administraciôn, Madrid, Agencia Estatal de Evaluaciön de las Politicas Püblicas y la Calidad de los Servicios, 2011, 11; Eloisa Del Pino: Los ciudadanos y el estado. Las actitudes de los espanoles hacia las administraciones y las politicas publicas, Madrid, INAP, 2004; Antonio Embid Irujo: El ciudadano y la Administraciön, Madrid, MAP, 1996. José Alvarez Junco: Mater Dolorosa. La idea de Espana en el siglo XIX, Madrid, Taurus, 2001; Sobre los procesos de nacionalizaciön en España, in Javier Moreno Luzôn (ed.): Construir Espana. Nacionalismo espanol y procesos de nacionalizaciön, Madrid, CEPC, 2007. Manuel Santirso: Progreso y Libertad. Espana en la Europa liberal (1830-1870), Barcelona, Ariel, 2007. * 80°
