Political Learning and Institutional Design. The Role of Legacies in Spain and Portugal.

Democracies are often the outcome of popular mobilizations, but only a given group leads the process of democratization. In particular the formal design of democratic institutions is, necessarily, the product of the political efforts of an élite, whose beliefs and preferences are particularly relevant. The books aims at identifying which legacies of the past have affected the institutional design of new democracies, and how. It starts from this concept to reconstruct the processes that, after the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal and the death of Franco in Spain, led to the design of new institutions of the two Iberian democracies and highlights the crucial role played by historical legacies, historical memory and political learning.