The regime of electoral participation of persons with disabilities in the 40 years of democracy

Abstract

Abstract:
This work deals with the study, in the historical perspective of the forty years of democracy in Spain, of the norms that have disciplined the electoral participation of people with disabilities, as a maximum exponent of the integration in the community of this so huge, varied and vulnerable collective. This allows not only to know the existing regulation in the various stages of our young democracy, but also, at the same time, to be able to value in a more complete way, with other contextual factors, the current legislation. The work is divided into the three stages that seem to us to be most significant from the point of view of the studied regulation: the start of democracy, with the electoral regulations of the time, the Royal Law Decree 20/1977, of March 18 (indifference period); the period of Organic Law 5/1985, of June 19, of the General Electoral Regime, and the adjustments and complements of the immediately following years (period of visualization); and the normative advances made at the start of the twenty-first century, with the very relevant United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and Royal Decree 422/2011, of March 25, approving the Regulation on the basic conditions for the participation of persons with disabilities in political life and in electoral processes (awareness period). This
is followed by a brief final considerations, recapitulatory and prospective, the main of which is to highlight the constant and solid progression that has gradually been produced in this field with a final result that deserves to be recognized and estimated. It is also pointed out that most of the established normative actions operate in the area of active suffrage, leaving aside the right to passive suffrage and other forms of participation; That legislative attention to the various groups of people with disabilities has not been balanced either over time or in the final result, with greater attention being paid to the problem of people with physical and sensory disabilities (visual or auditory) than those with intellectual and psychic disabilities; And that many challenges remain, such as the limitation of the restriction of the vote of persons with intellectual and mental disabilities and the adoption of support measures in the field of passive suffrage.