What can undergraduate students of comparative politics learn from
studying Spain? Clearly, many professors do not see any good reasons
to integrate Spain in introductory courses on comparative politics
or European politics. Spain is often considered as a country on the
periphery of western Europe—geographically, economically, and
politically—and thus not worth spending time discussing in
introductory courses on comparative politics or even western
European politics. Given the time constraints of short semesters,
instructors have to make choices about which topics and countries to
cover when choosing European case studies for their syllabus, and
often settle for a mix of the “classic” cases such as the United
Kingdom, Germany, and France, and “newer” cases, such as new
democracies in eastern and central Europe. Spain fits neither the
established, advanced industrialized democracies category nor is it
of much obvious interest for studying the latest developments in EU
expansion. Spain re-democratized in the latter half of the 1970s and
is currently celebrating 30 years of electoral democracy. The
country joined the EU, then the European Communities, in 1986,
together with Portugal and Greece. Thus, the newness of Spanish
democracy and its EU membership has long since passed as a point of
interest for college instruction, giving way to the new democracies
in central and eastern Europe and the more recent waves of EU
expansion. At the same time, Spanish democracy is too young to
present a classic case of advanced industrialized democracies. In
short, Spain does not appear to have much inherent appeal for
undergraduate comparative politics courses.I gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Wendy
Whitman in collecting information on textbooks and
syllabi.