Introduction

Many of the chapters in this book demonstrate that policy analysis is arelatively underexplored area in Spain. The core argument is that policyanalysis has been largely ignored by experts and academics. Instead,government officials have been responsible for choosing the most suitablepolicy options, selecting the most appropriate indicators by which toevaluate the public sector, and accumulating first-hand knowledge aboutpolicy implementation. This has shaped both public and privateactors’ roles in policy-making for a long time. The former both makedecisions and establish barriers to accessing decision-making, whileinterest groups are expected to come up with new demands that do not putpolitical stability at risk. This has led to the government and politicalparties’ dominance over policy priorities, though they claim torepresent public interests over private ones (Crozier, 1995). Arguably,Molins (2016) states that partisan alliances have long been a determiningfactor in explaining how much power and levels of access certain interestgroups achieve.

With regards to private companies, governments always listen to businessleaders, according to group theory (Plotke, 1992). While some authors arguethat this is due to the quality of the information businesses provide tosolve major socio-economic problems (Salisbury, 1969), others believe thatthis is instead a result of their structural position in the political,economic, and political systems (Vogel, 1987). Although the concept ofideological proximity can help explain the Franco period (1939– 75)(Sánchez Recio and Tascón Fernández, 2003), themodernisation of business– government interactions that began withthe arrival of democracy in 1978 took the form of neo-corporatist patterns.A series of political consensuses meant that old collective bargainingstructures were brought back, and the major business associations (andunions) were incorporated into ministerial forums in order to designeconomic, labour, and welfare policies. Solé (1990) argued thatsocial agreements on economic policy in the 1980s were a key politicalresource that was used to simultaneously appease the involutionary spiritsof the army and consolidate democracy. Recently, some economists havepointed out that the establishment of coordinated bargaining structures hasnot translated into effective policies (Bentolila and Jimeno, 2002). Thus,an important part of the literature suggests that business associations andtrade unions are obstacles to achieving necessary political reforms in theSpanish labour market.