Dictablanda
Sign in to saveis a dictatorship in which civil liberties are allegedly preserved rather than destroyed, and authoritarian and democratic features are combined. is a pun on ("dictatorship") replacing , which by itself is a Spanish word meaning "hard", with , meaning "soft".
Key facts
- Concept.name
- Dictablanda
- Concept.field
- Political science; comparative politics
- Concept.origin
- Spain, 1930
- Concept.purpose
- Term describing a "soft" dictatorship retaining some civil liberties
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Encyclopedic overview
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- References
is a dictatorship in which civil liberties are allegedly preserved rather than destroyed, and authoritarian and democratic features are combined. is a pun on ("dictatorship") replacing , which by itself is a Spanish word meaning "hard", with , meaning "soft".
The term was first used in 1930 during the second-last year of the Restoration (1874–1931) in Spain when Dámaso Berenguer replaced Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja as the head of the ruling dictatorial government, and attempted to reduce tensions in the country by repealing some of the harsher measures that Primo de Rivera had introduced. It was also used to refer to the later years of Francisco Franco's Spanish State, and to the hegemonic 70-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Dictablanda” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.