Introduction

In December 2018, the People’s Party presented a bill to create aregistry of lobbies in Spain with the aim of increasing transparency in thepolicy process. In the original proposal, trade unions and employerorganisations were included, among many other actors, as lobbies. Politicalparties were, however, divided on this proposal. According to thecentre-right Ciudadanos and leftist Podemos, the trade unions and employerorganisations should have been included in the lobbies list, while for thesocialist party PSOE, the trade unions were already recognisedconstitutionally and legally through their capacity to participate in publicpolicy processes. As expected, the trade unions fiercely opposed theirinclusion in this list. They maintained that as social partners, they had aconstitutional right and a clear mandate to participate in and influencepolicy-making processes that no other actor had.

This recent episode shows the controversy surrounding the two‘souls’ of trade unions as actors in the policy process. Onthe one hand, as policy insiders (Grant, 2004), their role as socialpartners arises in different ways, including in their participation insocial security and labour market agencies (Ysàs, 2013), intripartite social dialogue and policy concertation processes (Molina, 2011),and in national social dialogue institutions (Montalvo, 2008). However, thetrade unions are increasingly developing other outsider strategies aiming toinfluence the policy process, including making policy recommendations,issuing press releases, meeting with members of the parliament, issuingreports, conducting studies on specific topics, etc. These two sides of thetrade unions’ policy action have not only changed since thetransition to democracy but also evolved as mechanisms for policyintervention.

This chapter explores policy analysis in trade unions and reveals threefactors that play a key role in explaining the type and intensity of thepolicy analysis activities trade unions develop: the trade unions’role in the policy process, the trade unions’ organisationalcharacteristics, and industrial relations institutions. The mostrepresentative trade unions enjoy a policy insider position in social andlabour market-related areas through their participation in public agencies,national social dialogue institutions and policy concertation. However,their involvement in public policy-making remains unstable and contingent onthe government’s attitude due to weak institutionalisation.