Winner of the 2019 ResearchEdge Competition

Elisa will be presenting her work: "How Social Movements Transform Public Tolerance of Corruption: an Autopsyof the Spanish Indignados Movement"

In late May 2018, the conservative People’s Party (PP) was ousted from government through a no-confidence vote presented by the Socialist Party after the National High Court of Spain determined that the party itself had benefitted from illegal payoffs from government contracts and that Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish Prime Minister, and party Secretary General at the time, had not testified truthfully as a witness during the trial. This no-confidence vote was the fourth to take place since the instauration of democracy in Spain (1978) and the only one to actually prosper.
For the first time since post-Francoist transition into democracy, public uprising and indignation towards corrupt politicians and practices shocked Spanish current affairs to the point of encouraging the abdication of a long-standing monarch in 2014 and the removal of a party suspected of being corrupt from power in 2018. The Indignados movement that was borne out of social media in 2011, demanded profound changes to the economic, political and social systems in place at the climax of the worst economic recession to hit Spain in modern times. Since then, the existence of multiple trials related to party corruption, cronyism and influence peddling has provoked outspoken criticism and a clear break with the national bi-partisan tradition through the creation and proliferation of new political parties with clear zero-tolerance policies towards corrupt practices.
This paper aims to explore, on the basis of the Spanish case study and through desk research and statistical evidence provided by both national and international sources, the political changes that have occurred in Spain as a response to corruption, the changes in social tolerance towards perceived corruption and the legislative and political measures that have been put into place in order to answer the question of how a particular social movement, which inspired many others around the world, challenged social tolerance and incited political activism in a country traditionally marred by corrupt practices. This paper also intends to shed some light on how technological progress, through the use of social media and platforms, allowed this social movement to grow, expand, develop and integrate part of local and national transparency reform in the form of many open government and eGovernment initiatives at both national and local levels.