Issues related to Catalan secessionism are central to current debates on European integration, nationalism, and territorial politics, and the Catalan independence movement has become famous for its large annual demonstrations on Catalan national day, the Diada. This paper represents the first attempt at a thorough empirical investigation of the most important political event in Catalonia combining historical and ethnographic analysis that covers the current modern period from 1977 to 2019. This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to study the Diada mobilisations with two different main approaches determined principally by the availability of sources. We investigate the recent period of activating the Diada since 2012 using qualitative interviews, ethnographic data, and social media analysis. For the more distant periods of the Diada celebration, we use a more classical historical approach centred on discourse analysis of print media and public discourses. We find that there has been a marked shift in the perception and organisation of the Diada in recent years. We conclude that when civil society organisations are in charge of the Diada celebration, the result is a more politically charged event that mobilises a much larger proportion of the population than when politicians and political parties organise the celebration. Further, when political parties are in charge, the Diada not only mobilises far fewer people, but usually takes on a much more cultural and festive character compared with the explicitly political Diada demonstrations organised by civil society actors since 2012.

National identities are social phenomena with concrete-both political and social-effects in society, but a fundamental part of their constitution takes place through narratives about the collective. The existence of collective identities thus depends on drawing boundaries between the collective 'we' and the 'others', as well as on disseminating coherent ideas about the fundamental identity of the we-group. These narratives thus constitute a privileged object for investigating how collective identities are constructed and legitimised in a discourse that places the collective in time, that is, with a coherent and logical narrative about the past and a trustworthy projection into the future. This article defends, first, the concept of the 'master narrative' as a useful analytical category for investigating how national history is constructed, and, second, the concepts of 'sites of memory' and 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung' as means of accessing this narrative. These concepts represent instances of creation and rewriting, respectively, of the narrative and are thus useful tools for analysing how a sense of connectedness with the community through time is created: that is, how a sense of continuity with certain distant epochs is conveyed, and how, on the other hand, a sense of discontinuity with other periods is favoured.

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This article argues for a renovation in the study of nationalism by addressing the issue of the rationality underlying the decisions by citizens willing to leave their homelands. From the example of unforced exiles from the 1939 Republican diaspora (and inner exiles as well), the text starts with providing a theory of disidentification from a nation for the sake of civic commitment. Having shown the relevance of jointly studying the language of nation and patria, it focuses on Spanish post-Francoist historiography of the Early modern period for showing its unbalanced account of discourse revolving around patria in favor of that of nation. Thereafter, it provides a comparative overview of the scholarly interest in patriotism in modern history as depending on different national trajectories of political culture. Finally, it claims a methodological reorientation in the study of nationalism and patriotism by distinguishing between nation and patria as terms, as concepts, and as analytical categories defining distinctive collective identities.

Esta nota de investigación es un estudio innovador sobre la organización territorial del Estado español (ORTE) y su anclaje, y encaje, sobre definiciones de nación. Es una aportación técnica, en forma de protocolo de codificación, que permite medir, en los discursos políticos, los cambios en las preferencias respecto a la ORTE y los sentimientos de pertenencia hacia España y la región. Ambos fenómenos sociales están cambiando mucho últimamente, pero para conocer cómo se han producido estos cambios y cómo se les otorga legitimidad por élites políticas necesitamos un instrumento que permita medir dichos cambios, de forma sistemática, a lo largo del tiempo. Presentamos el marco metodológico que estamos aplicando a un estudio comparativo de cinco estatutos de autonomía diferentes y sus reformas respectivas, y un avance de los resultados que produce el protocolo. Key words AbstractThis paper is an innovative study about the territorial organisation of the Spanish State (TOSS) and how it is anchored and fits within definitions of nationhood. This is a technical contribution in the form of a codification protocol designed to measure changes in preferences regarding the TOSS and feelings of belonging to Spain and a given region in political discourse. Both social phenomena have experienced major changes in recent years; but in order to understand how these changes have occurred and how they have been legitimised by political elites, an instrument is needed to measure these changes systematically over time. A methodological framework is presented here that has been applied to a comparative study of five different Statutes of Autonomy and the reforms that they have undergone, together with a preliminary overview of the results produced by the protocol. Cómo citarHumlebaek, Carsten y Ruiz Jiménez, Antonia María (2018). «La nación en España: un instrumento de medida cualitativo para una cuestión compleja». Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 142La nación en España: un instrumento de medida cualitativo para una cuestión compleja IntroduccIón 1El objetivo de esta nota de investigación es presentar el diseño metodológico aplicado a los discursos parlamentarios de los partidos políticos (tanto en los Parlamentos regionales como en las Cortes en Madrid) que han participado en las diferentes reformas de los cinco estatutos de autonomía seleccionados.Como diferentes autores han apuntado, la creación y desarrollo del Estado de las autonomías parece haber generado vínculos afectivos con la comunidad política de ámbi-to autonómico (Martínez-Herrera, 2002; Jiménez y Navarro, 2012), incluso donde su presencia era escasa o nula previamente (García Álvarez, 2002). Este proceso ha sido paralelo a la consolidación electoral de partidos de ámbito no estatal (PANE) en regiones donde anteriormente esta dimensión no era significativa. Diversos autores han demostrado, tanto para el caso de España (Pallarés y Keating, 2003; Libbrecht, Maddens y Swenden, 2011) como para otros países, que los contextos multinivel generan competenc...

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