Álvaro La Parra-Pérez
Weber State U.

La Parra-Pérez

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(Friday, 16th May 2025)

Title : The Dynamics of a Ruling Coalition: Revolving Doors in Spain (1920-2020)

We have created a dataset with almost 100,000 political and economic elites in Spain between 1920 and 2020. We study the revolving doors—the transition of elites from politics to economics and vice versa—during this period. The connections between politics and economics are one of the central topics in the most recent literature in institutional economics (e.g., North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009); Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). Given the variety of political regimes that the country had during this period (there were five different regimes and the government spent roughly half the years under democracy and the remaining half under autocracies), Spain offers a valuable case study to study the dynamics of a ruling coalition in natural states (or extractive institutions) and open access orders (or inclusive institutions). We are finishing a descriptive paper about the dynamics of revolving doors, but we are also drafting another manuscript exploring the role of trade shocks to explain their dynamics. I am also publishing a book chapter related to this topic (it does not examine the revolving doors but the overlap between different elite groups in 1920-2000) that could be used for a broader discussion of elites in Spain in the last century.