This book addresses the changing relationships among political participation, political representation, and popular mobilization in Spain from the 1766 protest in Madrid against the early Bourbon reforms until the citizen revolution of 1868 that first introduced universal suffrage and led to the ousting of the monarchy.

Popular Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain shows that a notion of the “crowd” internally dividing the concept of “people” existed before the advent of Liberalism, allowing for the enduring subordination of popular...