Judicial Independence in an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Contemporary Spain

Extract

The present Spanish regime is not a democratic one if by democracy we mean a political situation which:

supplies regular constitutional opportunities for peaceful competition for political power (and not just a share of it) to different groups without excluding any signifcant sector of the population by force (Linz, 1964).

Rather, it has been characterized as authoritarian, using that term to describe a distinct genus besides democracy and totalitarianism. Generally, political democracy and judicial independence tend to be associated, the former being considered a necessary though not sufficient precondition for the latter. Thus, one might be inclined to expect contemporary Spain to display a strongly politicized and ideologically uniform judiciary. The first section of this paper will suggest, however, that this is far from being the case: recent survey data from a national sample of Spanish judges testify to the existence of a remark-able degree of ideological diversity among the members of the Spanish judiciary. Such a pattern is explained in the second section of the paper as the correlate of the considerable degree of independence from the political system which the Spanish judges seem to enjoy with respect to their selection, training, promotions and everyday activities.