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- Author or Editor: Laura Chaqués-Bonafont x
This book is the first systematic study of policy analysis activities in Spain.
It provides a comprehensive overview of how policy actors, including politicians, think tanks, researchers, interest groups and experts, generate information for the policy-making process. The book explores how executive and legislative actors participate in the production of policy analysis and how all actors elaborate and disseminate information on policy analysis.
Contributors consider the ways different policy actors are involved in the production of data and information about policy problems, the resources used to produce policy analysis and the type of analysis produced over time in different policy areas.
This chapter explains the main features of policy analysis in Spain. Considering the contributions of this edited volume, it describes how policy actors generate and share technical and political information to address social, economic, and political issues across different institutional frameworks, policy areas, and time. It argues that in recent decades a gradual transformation of policy analysis in Spain from a closed model to a more pluralist and specialised model occurred. Policy analysis in Spain has increased in terms of the number of actors involved, the issues under discussion, and the type of information for the policy process produced. In contrast to previous decades, governmental actors – mainly top public servants – along with a small community of policy experts who traditionally participated in knowledge production lost their monopolistic position in favour of other actors. The proliferation of the number and type of actors involved in policy analysis has expanded policy analysis to multiple areas of interest of researchers and experts, and it has also altered the policy-making process, moving towards a more complex and fragmented political scenario. It evidences an evolution towards a new culture of reporting based on empirical sources, examining facts, applying technical knowledge, and confronting views and values to inspire public policies, overcoming the production of policy analysis from a legalist approach.
This chapter explains public opinion survey data in Spain. It provides an overview of the extent to which public opinion data is available, and how public institutions –mainly the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) – conduct public opinion surveys. The analysis relies on a novel dataset containing all the surveys carried out from 1978 to 2018 by CIS, the leading public opinion data producer in Spain. The analysis illustrates that public opinion surveys increasingly provide information about citizens’ ideas, beliefs, preferences, and values about policies instead of politics, with significant differences across policy areas. Also, results illustrate that most surveys cover Spain’s whole territory, but sample sizes are not large enough to allow for a comparison across regions, with some exceptions. Finally, most surveys define the target population as Spanish citizens, leaving aside more than 12 per cent of the population living in Spain.
