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STATE BUILDING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY and trade unions grew stronger, outside of these spheres civil society did not coalesce into social actors capable of creating their own national space, independent of the state and public authorities. We share Paloma Radcliff’s assessment that twentieth-century Spain shows more elements of a civil society at the local level than at the national one’. In this arena, three political cultures experienced a considerable development: Republicanism, trade unions and consumer activism (with a growing female presence towards the end of the Restoration period). Even so, these locally-based civil society movements did not lead to true democratization of the country — indeed, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923-1930) attests to this. The Second Republic also failed to normalize relations between the state and civil society within a democratic framework. The establishment of a new democratizing regime failed due to the persistence of a still relatively weak and deficient state, incapable of adequately channeling the expectations of a society which, though now more mobilized, still lacked a democratic political culture. THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF THE STATE UNDER VARIOUS POLITICAL REGIMES Since 1876 Spain has gone through five different regimes, three constitutions (1876, 1931 and 1978), a constitutional draft (1929), a civil war, two dictatorships — Primo de Rivera’s and General Franco’s — and the current democratic regime. Yet, interestingly enough, the general structure of the state has undergone no radical changes, with the exception of making allowance for autonomous regions during the Second Republic and in the Estado de las autonomias after the 1978 Constitution. In any event, there were few changes before 1978 in terms of administrative culture, civil service mentality or local administrative structure — local councils remained subjected to a strict hierarchy, under the authority of civil governors and following orders stemming from the central government. From 1876 until at least the 1960s, the state’s effectiveness as a provider of goods and services was modest at best, with the exception of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and its public works policy, based on public credit and debt. To be sure, a key cause of such ineffectiveness lay in the limited resources available to the state in an underdeveloped country. Yet there were other contributing factors, including corruption, irregularities in the functioning of the administration and a perverse inversion in values in which public 16 Pamela Radcliff: El estado y la sociedad civil en la Espana del siglo XX, Paper presented in the Seminar organized by the Ortega y Gasset Institute, 23 January 2003. See: 23 de enero de 2003: “El Estado y la sociedad civil en la Espafia del siglo XX”, por Pamela Radcliff. Comentarista: José Alvarez Junco. + 83 +