Explaining the presence and absence of Spanish farm cooperatives before 1936: a political economy approach

Spanish farm cooperatives were limited in number and performed poorly before the Civil War. Rather than a lack of trust and social capital, this paper advances two alternative arguments. First, cooperatives often failed to offer the optimal level of scale to farmers for their day-to-day activities. In some case cooperatives were too large, which encouraged more informal forms of organization. When they were too small, greater scale could only be obtained by integrating cooperatives into federations. These required top-down support, which was provided in many European countries by landowners and the Church, as a result of competitive politics, that required them to build mass parties and organize small farmers politically. By contrast in Spain this was not forthcoming, as the Restoration political settlement (1876-1923) removed the need for party competition, and consequently left the needs of small farmers unattended. Only in Cataluña, and to a lesser extent Valencia, did regional party politics create these necessary conditions.