Preliminary Programme

The attention of the studies on corruption has focused, for the most part, on electoral fraud and the more or less veiled accusations made in parliament that mark the session books occasionally, without diminishing the relevance that the paradigm preserves "costista" in some of the most recent studies. We start by building for the first time an annual series of criminal statistics related to corruption, whose study reveals that, below the occasional scandals that skipped media life with some name of relevant politician, the fight against corruption broke out with greater determination at the local and provincial levels of the country’s politics, the only ones that explain the geography and the large number of judicial cases for corruption registered in a critical period in the political and social modernization of the country that would end with the Civil War: 1915 to 1936. In other words, these high and persistent levels of denunciations indicate that, in the process of demolishing the old building of the oligarchic policy, the main areas of rubble were located outside the ministerial headquarters and centers of state power, that is, the provincial and local scenarios starring an emerging mobilization of the middle classes under the demand for regeneration and cleanliness in political life with which the twentieth century was inaugurated in Spain and Europe (Show less)

On 17 April 1861, an election law was enacted in Peru, which aimed to guarantee the freedom of suffrage and fair elections through various legal provisions. However, the analysis of the elections held in the years immediately after the law reveals the repetition of certain behaviours perceived as scandalous and, therefore, the inability of legislation to prevent electoral fraud. In this context, this paper analyses the perception of electoral fraud through the debate raised in public opinion, as well as the reactions of legislators to this phenomenon and the possible solutions proposed in this regard. With this aim, we mainly use the news of electoral abuses reported by the press and the debates that took placed in the Congress during 1860s. Finally, we propose a reflection on the political use of electoral fraud in Peru’s nineteenth century and its connection with the expansion or restriction of political participation in the liberal system. (Show less)

Electoral protests have traditionally been acknowledged as evidence of fraud. Scholars have not paid much attention to this issue until recently, so that this interpretation has remained largely unchanged. Beyond fraud, recent research has shed light on those claims as instruments of politicisation. Accordingly, this paper aims to offer a current state of the art regarding the historiographical analysis of electoral protests in Modern Spain, adding some reflections on the methodology of their study. (Show less)

The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) came about as a democratic regime that recognised the need for the remuneration of the deputies. This principle honoured the will to guarantee the political rights of all citizens and to avoid the monopolisation of parliamentary representation by large fortunes. However, the Republic was also conceived as a moralising project of Spanish politics after the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, branded as corrupt, fraudulent, and oligarchic. Thus, the parliamentary remuneration process was punctuated by debates and controversies over the abuse in the reception of per diem and the accumulation of public offices through influence peddling, the latter also known as “pluggism” (enchufismo). To put an end to these practices, which were denounced as the immoral prelude to widespread corruption and as contrary to the principles of honesty and austerity, the governments of the first republican biennium (made up of leftist and centre-leftist republicans and socialists) prepared a Law of Incompatibilities that was approved in 1933 and remained in force until the outbreak of Spanish Civil War.
Taking all this into account, the aims of this paper are diverse. Firstly, the genesis of the debate on the parliamentary remuneration and the incompatibility of public offices will be inquired to understand the precedents of the republican debate. This will be complemented with a tracing of the genesis, evolution, and changes of the political concept “plug” (enchufe) and its derivatives, voices that even to this day are part of the Spanish political culture to refer to the achievement of public offices through favouritism.
Secondly, through newspapers sources, but also political literature and cartoons, the paper will go into how parliamentary remuneration and accumulation of public offices became scandalous between 1931 and 1933. The consideration of this issue by different political cultures will allow us to observe how the denunciation of immorally perceived money and public offices became a demand for virtue and a new political morality by exalted republicans. But it also became a “throwing weapon” used by antirepublican and antiparliamentary forces, both from far-right and far-left, to try to undermine the legitimacy of the republican regime and its government. In this sense, the case of Manuel Cordero Pérez, a socialist politician nicknamed “the great pluggist”, will be paradigmatic to study the discourses on public morality of the different Spanish political cultures.
Lastly, the paper will focus on the parliamentary debate on remuneration of the deputies and incompatibilities that took place in the Republican Courts to observe the institutional response to the scandalous situation. The analysis of the consequent rules and laws, mainly the Law of Incompatibilities and the minutes of the Parliamentary Commission on Incompatibilities, will serve this purpose too.
In conclusion, through political history and cultural history, with a small foray into the history of concepts, this paper aims to weigh the role of the denunciations against corruption and the demands for vigilance towards the professional politicians as tools of politicisation and promoters of political (mis)trust in modern Spain. (Show less)