Political Socialization, Emotions, and Citizenship: Democratic Political Culture in the Films during the Spanish Transition

Abstract

After Franco´s death in 1975, Spain began a new stage in its history whose first step was called Transición democrática. Our democratic regime had to impose its own rules, extremely different from the ones previously established by Franco Regime. According to Nussbaum, all political principles need an emotional support to survive, become real and achieve stability over time. Emotions need to be transmitted by agents of socialization such as family, school or the mass media. Experts in mass media point out the different mental and emotional processes that take place when people sit in front of a screen and stare at it, and the way that these processes interact with each other. A considerable amount of information is received, and despite being frequently unconscious for us, it
enters our brain, causing a deep impact in our personality. The main aim in our research is to examine to what extent Spanish cinema of this period helped the democratic system garner support and, subsequently, what kind of a sense of citizenship these films portrayed. The sample used consists of twenty-two films whose only common element is the period in which they were made, the Transición democrática