Despite not being a federation Spain is deeply decentralized country. The present-day system of political and territorial organization was outlined during the process of transition to democracy, which took place between 1975 and 1982. The so-called State of Autonomies was based on consensus and will to find a general agreement among the main political actors. Hence, to some extent, it has an ambivalent nature and nowadays is short of full acceptance and finality. This fact alongside the age- old heterogeneity of Spanish population results in a cleavage mirrored in the different views on desirable power and territorial configuration of the country. Today, Spain is divided into seventeen autonomous communities. These units are endowed with both executive and legislative functions and they constitute distinctive political arenas. In some of them the political competition resembles that of the national level. Nevertheless, in the majority of the communities the regional political parties have got an important, sometimes even pivotal role. Right these actors of regional politics are in the focus of this research. In its scope we defined two aims. Firstly, we want to find out what attitudes the regional political parties take towards the autonomous state and its nature, and, respectively, if and to what...
As it is provided in the 1999 Constitution, federalism in Venezuela is a contradictory form of government. Typically, a federation is a politically decentralized state organization based on the existence and functioning of autonomous states. The power of that decentralized state is distributed among the national state and the member states. In contrast, the federation in Venezuela is a centralized federation, which is a contradiction in itself. Unfortunately, Venezuela is not a good example of the importance of federalism in Latin America because it is a federation based on a very centralized national government, with twenty-three formal autonomous states and one capital district. Each of these twenty-three formal autonomous states is without its own effective public policies and its own substantive subnational constitutions; and if it is true that they have elected authorities, those have been weakened by the central government. Regarding the capital district, against the provisions of the 1999 Constitution, it has been regulated in 2009 by a national law with the same trends as the former federal district; that is, without self-government, dependent of the national executive. But the federation in the country's history has not always been like it is now. The centralization of the federation occurred progressively during the twentieth century and has been particularly accentuated during the past decade. Centralization began with the installment of the authoritarian government of the dictator Juan Vicente GĂłmez, who ruled for approximately three decades in the first half of the twentieth century. During those years, no democratic institutions were developed.
During the first months of 1864, the construction process of Zulia as a sovereign state was initiated affirming the principles of federation, supported since the beginnings of the republic. The federalists had to establish a new order resulting from a consensus among the local powers that had agreed on a new pact of association. Organizing a âsociety of societiesâ implied adapting political tradition to the needs for decentralizing the State to benefit the new sovereign, autonomous entities. Achievements in legal-political organization and use of power by the sovereign government of Zulia showed the extent of the federal state in Venezuela.