This article has a double purpose. On one hand, it briefly reviews the main political scandals in democratic Spain and tries to account for why political corruption gained a privileged position in the Spanish public agenda only during the decade of the 1990s and up to the Socialist’s electoral defeat of 1996. On the other hand, and the main focus of this article, the Spanish case is used to build a model for the analysis of scandals based on the idea that these phenomena are not automatic processes of social control but rather the result of political struggles among different social elites of which the final outcome is unpredictable.
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