Spanish Youth Ideas about the Recent Past: The Case of the Transition to Democracy

The condition of recent history as a living past, where conflicting memories are present, confers an extraordinary value to the more recent historical events, such as the Spanish transition to democracy. However, studies carried out in Spain evidence that teachers do not usually spend too much time or attention to this historical period. Hence, the interest of this study, whose aim is to analyze the adolescents' implicit theories regarding the institution of democracy in Spain, after finishing compulsory education. To this end, a mixed qualitative-quantitative research design has been used, interrogating 913 students from eight different Spanish cities by making use of a questionnaire of open and close-ended questions, where they had to select one of several options and then justify or explain their choice. The information has been quantitatively processed and examined with the SPSS software, and qualitatively analyzed with ATLAS.ti. Results show that adolescents understand the need for a time period to adapt political structures to the new democratic system through negotiation between political forces, with the objective of achieving an agreement, although they do not always apply these ideas to the current context. It is striking that a significant part of them perceive it as a convulsive process, an idea that contrasts with the historiographic vision that is predominant in textbooks, and that interprets the Transition as an exemplary historical period, exportable to other contexts.