The appointment of ministers between 1977 and 2021 has underrepresented multilingual areas

Juan Rodríguez Teruel. A study in which the professor of the Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science and Administration Juan Rodríguez Teruel participates shows that there is no equitable geographical distribution of the plurality of the Spanish State in the appointment of ministers. The analysis of 223 of these positions through 375 appointments, between the years 1977 and 2021, sought to demonstrate a hypothetical overrepresentation of ministers from the Catalan, Basque and Galician minorities, although it has been found that areas with a monolingual identity dominate the ministerial elite. The research sought to demonstrate whether there was consociationalism in Spanish politics, that is, if there was a form of government in deeply divided societies in which power is distributed among the elites, beyond any majority logic, despite the religious, linguistic or ethnic differences that may exist between sociocultural groups. The work, published in the journal Ethnopolitics , does not reflect a consociational logic of representation of territorial interests, but rather favours cabinet ministers from areas with a monolingual linguistic orientation and emphasises the individual skills of the most qualified candidates. than the "hidden quotas" referred to Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia. In addition, the conclusions show that the territorial selection depends on three main variables: the regional educational level, the marginalisation of multilingual autonomous communities and the exclusion of regionalist and nationalist parties from Congress, characteristics that favour the election of ministerial candidates from regions without regional language such as Madrid, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia, Murcia or the Canary Islands.