ELECTIONS WITHOUT "TURNO" : THE SPANISH GENERAL ELECTIONS OF 1879

This paper deals with the Spanish elections to the Congress of Deputies, 1879. Held under Martinez-Campos government, they were the first experience with the new electoral law of 1878 and the return of limited suffrage. Taking place when the parties "turno" and "encasillado" were not yet institutionalized, those elections have specific features that differentiate them from sucessive elections. The most important are: a smaller government intervention, increased competition and proselytizing compared with Constituents "Cortes" of 1876, and a limited incidence of fraud and corruption. With unpublished documents of archives, press intensive study and using comparison and theories of electoral modernization through competition and "nacionalization" process of nineteeth-century politics, the author attempts to reopen debates about whether the elections had not been able to provide an alternative to the "prerrogativa regia", especially in determining the distribution of political power.