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Francoism and local powers: intermediation, legitimation and socially differentiated access to extremely scarce resources.
| This communication endeavours to study the elite political positions (public positions) on a parish, local and provincial level in rural Spain during Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975). The aim is to identify and analyse the political actions and behaviours of mayors, local Partido Unico (FET and de las Jons leaders, local syndicate representatives, civil provincial governors and even (where possible) land workers who acted as advisors or representatives of the dictatorship in the heart of small rural parish and village communities.
On the one hand, this presentation will examine to what extent these institutional representatives of the dictatorship put into practice or materialised public policies, principally agrarian, designed within the central powers of the regime; what difficulties they faced (peasantry resistance, the inefficient administrative system, lacking economic resources…), and the differences between the designs and hypothetical programmes (the ideal) and their degree of execution in reality (in the field). On the other hand, this communication will also analyse the role of intermediaries between local communities and centres of political decision, as well as the potential effects of this intermediation: the development of personal loyalties, the consolidation of political positions, privileged social and economic policies in local communities, the generation of attitudes of acceptance and consent towards these policies and the regime they represented…
Finally, and considering the aforementioned aspects, this presentation will study the functioning mechanisms of the intra-community social networks (networks theory), with the aim of isolating possible client behaviours, which may have appeared, for example, in the socially differentiated application of certain rural policies of Franco's State. Probably, both the “privileged” access to some of these policies (social subsidies, medical insurance, delivery of inputs and fuel at competitive prices, rural credits…), as well as the restriction of others (intervention and acquisition of agrarian products, personal work loans…) were granted according to aspects such as membership to a certain “local group or band”, the degree of affinity or indifference/opposition of individuals and families towards the regime, as well as economic, social and political relationships with influential people outside the rural community context, etc.
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