Icelandic and Spanish citizens before the crisis: Size Matters.and institutions too

• Published in: Revista de Economía Mundial
• Main Author: UHU, Revistas científicas
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad de Huelva 2022
• Subjects: Financial Crisis; Citizen involvement; Political dissatisfaction; Democracy; 15-M movement; Small-states Literature; Institutions; Crisis financiera; participación ciudadana; desafección política; democracia directa; 15-M; instituciones; Iceland
• Online Access: http://www.uhu.es/publicaciones/ojs/index.php/REM/article/view/7482; https://doi.org/10.33776/rem.v0i43.7482

In this paper, a comparative analysis between the main political citizen attitudesbefore the crisis in Iceland and Spain is carried out. After a brief reviewof political and economical antecendents, it was concluded that in Spain, aswell as in Iceland, the key explanatory factors of the deep economic imbalancesare located at the institutional sphere. The excesses are related in bothcases to political clientelism and to diverse corruptions practices, in such away that even the alarming signs that preceded “the official date” of the economiccrisis, no convenient measures were adopted in time. In this context, thecrisis has played a catalyst role, accelerating the demands aimed at achievinga better performance of the democratic system in both countries. Distrust inpoliticians and in political parties, as well as in other formal institutions, hasnot been translated neither in lack of confidence in the democracy system perse, nor in poltical apathy. Moreover, the discontent has been in both casestranslated into both formulae of more political informal participation and of agreater support to more direct democracy, though through differents channelsand with different results. In the discussion, diverse hypotheses are exploredin order to explain the main findings in the comparative analysis. On the onehand, some of the variables associated to small-states literature are taken intoaccount, in order to argue the main differences found out between the Spanishand Icelandic cases. On the other, diverse hypotheses from the political scienceliterature are considered in search of a plausible explanation of the majorparallelisms found.