Political representation in Spain during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera

The dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera put into practice, for the firs time in Spain, a representative system away from the liberal parliamentary model. The acceptance of corporative principles, based on an organic conception of society, allowed for creating the National Consultative Assembly, a non-legislative body destined to cooperate in government tasks and provide a constitutional way out from dictatorship. An assembly that came to conceive a draft constitution in which the Cortes was planned with a corporatist character. Combining the exegesis of legal texts, the review of records of sessions and the contrast with doctrinal contributions, this article studies the nature, composition, organization and functions of these bodies, as well as the political rule they carried out within the structure of power at that time.