El impacto de la acción parlamentaria en una política gubernamental: el caso de la política turística española

Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries and a key sector in Spain. Tourism has become part of governmental programmes since its development in the country, and the Spanish Government has developed a specific tourism public policy since 1978. Nevertheless, tourism is a controversial issue that involves different types of positive and negative impacts. The aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between the Legislature and governmental tourism policy by exploring the extent to which the parliamentary groups –and, especially, the opposition– have had an impact in the policy design process. Even if it is commonly assumed that legislatures play a relatively residual role in the process of policy formulation, our aim is to empirically assess the degree to which this is really the case for tourism policies in Spain. The most significant conclusions of our study are that in Spain we find a high consistency and similarity of the contents of legislative proposals by the parliamentary groups during the last thirty years, and that Parliament has played mostly a reactive (rather than active) role in this field.