The last twenty-five years have radically transformed the Spanish political scene. The establishment of democratic institutions, the legal protection of human rights, and the decentralization of the administrative structures have profoundly re-organized political life. This re-organization at macro-level has also been reflected in dizzyingly fast developments in nearly all sectors of policy making. Some of them did not even exist before the transition to democracy, e.g. environmental policy or gender equality policy, and others, like fiscal policy or social policy, which have been extensively re-modelled. But, as the authors correctly state in their introduction, we still do not know enough about the informal processes of decision making, the nature and interaction of actors involved nor the epistemic and cognitive frameworks within which they operate. Choosing 14 different policy areas, the ambitious goal of this edited volume has been specifically to give some answers to these rather open and unexplored questions.

The first two introductory chapters provide a succinct, yet interesting, analytical basis for the rest of the book. The first chapter is an overview of the transformations in Spanish politics and policies since the end of the 1970s. The authors point out that the major socio-political cleavages in Spanish politics are ideological and territorial ones. Furthermore, four phases are identified in the time span between 1977 and 1996, coinciding with the different terms of the governments in power. However, the meagre seven pages of this chapter provide a limited perspective especially in historical terms. A short study about the legacies of the Francoist period could have been interesting at this point, showing clearly the paramount challenges facing political actors at the beginning of the democratic regime. The second introductory chapter is, however, more generous in its formulation, as it develops the analytical framework to be used in the case studies. In this sense, it is a well-structured review of the latest analytical approaches in policy analysis, bringing to the Spanish field the concepts and meso-theoretical debates of international scholarship. The emphasis that the editors place on the cognitive dimension and the role of ideas in policy making, balancing the conventional perspective normally centred on the role of single actors’ interests is remarkable. In my view, this is of foremost importance in Spain, where the difficulty of creating and consolidating wide, but still common, cognitive frameworks in most policy areas partly explains the paradox of the highly visible conflicts in Spanish politics, but the relative silence and stealth of policy making.

The different policy areas examined in the book have been divided into three large groups: ‘governing the economy’, which includes chapters on industrial policy, fiscal policy and labour market; ‘welfare state’ with chapters on education, pensions, unemployment benefits and housing; and ‘new policy areas’ like environment, telecommunications, language, immigration and gender policy. The first and the second groups, being functionally homogeneous, have an introductory chapter. These are the ones written by Boix and by Rodríguez Cabrero, respectively, and concern governing the economy and welfare politics, and show outstanding analytical skills, providing a lucid and balanced account of the complex and rapidly changing trends in these two political domains.

The first group of chapters, the ones dedicated to industrial and labour market policies by Castañer and Recio, are excellent studies looking at the historical transformations of policy formulations and instruments. The attention paid to political actors and processes is well combined within considerations about the ‘external’ context, namely the rapidly changing economic (national and international) production structures. The chapter about fiscal policy, also within this group, is definitively more oriented towards economics in its analysis. Despite acknowledging the political choices of the different types of taxes, and the social and political dimension of the extensive fiscal fraud, this chapter by González Calvet does not explicitly examine the negotiating actors, their interactions, their alternative arguments, and their effects on the sequential outputs from the deep re-formulation of this policy.

The chapters subsumed under the ‘welfare state’ grouping highlight larger analytical differences among them. The accurate and excellent chapter on education policy by Bonal is the only one of its kind. The chapters on health and housing policies by Guillén and Cabiedes and Garcia and Tatjer are generally quite descriptive. In the first case, the tables and data presented are rather out of date, failing to provide information later than the early 1990s. Yet, the most problematic aspect of both chapters is their closeness to the discourse of official reports and documents, and the lack of focus placed on the actors and their political debates. The chapter about pensions and unemployment benefits by Adelantado, Noguera and Rambla contains overly ideological utterances which do not help to elaborate a nuanced picture of decision-making dynamics. The bias against neo-liberal alternatives in this chapter is clear, the contributors participating rather than studying the genesis of the conflicting political choices. Notwithstanding its detailed and well-documented account, the ideological content undermines its analytical sharpness.

The five chapters lumped together under the third group of ‘new policy areas’ do indeed show analytical sharpness. In collective terms, they tend to follow much more closely the conceptual and analytical framework of the introductory chapters in the book, emphasizing the dynamics of actors’ networks and their effects on policy outputs. The chapters on telecommunication and environmental policies, by Jordana and Aguilar, stress the dominance of specific actors in policy making throughout the period studied, and the relevance of the changing nature of the European context for these functional domains. Linguistic and immigration policies are two hotly debated policies in Spain, as in many other European countries. The excellence of these analyses by Arguelaguet and Casey rests primarily in the detailed attention paid to related political symbolism and complex social dynamics. Last but not least, gender policy in Spain has tended to be a rather low-profile political domain which is now gaining visibility both for women themselves and society in general. The lucid and accurate study by Sensat and Varella locates itself in the relevant debate being held within ‘gender studies’ at international level.

The careful work in the two concluding chapters shows the willingness of the editors to close an academic exercise in a reflective manner. The idea of splitting the conclusions into two chapters, one summing up previous case studies, and another more analytical in content, is a good one. This second chapter deals again with the territorial dimension of Spanish policy making, both from the decentralization and Europeanization dimensions, showing by functional sectors, the complexity and multi-level nature of the political space. And also, this chapter deals with policy style in Spanish politics. However, it is difficult to assess a single definition of the national policy style, since the sectors analysed in the book simultaneously demonstrate reactive, anticipatory, conflictive and consensual forms. In spite of these notorious functional disparities Subirats and Gomà still see a historical trend: moving from reactive, consensual and open networks in policy style during the 1977–82 period, to a more anticipatory, conflictive and closed form of networks during the three terms of Socialist governments (until 1996), in which the activism of the governmental actor re-balanced the modes of policy making. The short discussion about the modernization of public administration included in this chapter could have benefited from a discussion about the role of technocrats and professionals in the central position that governmental actors have held in policy networks, and the predominance of ‘technical’ solutions over ‘political’ ones.

To sum up, we can congratulate Gomà and Subirats for undertaking the daunting and exhausting task of editing a book that indicates the turning point for policy analysis in Spain. Their work will not only open up further empirical lines of research, but also hopefully much needed theoretical and conceptual debates within Spanish scholarship. Undoubtedly, international researchers could benefit much from an English version of this work, which would also serve to bring these policy areas into a broader comparative light.