El papel de los ayuntamientos frente a los procesos de exclusión en el medio rural. Estudio cualitativo comparativo en la Comunitat Valenciana.

The objective of this doctoral thesis is to analyse local actions addressing social exclusion processes in rural areas. It was designed as an interdisciplinary qualitative research analysing as case studies thirty rural municipalities in Comunitat Valenciana (Spain). The theoretical framework is built from contributions from different social disciplines as Sociology, Geography, Social Work and Political Science in order to describe the existent knowledge about the object of research and to contribute to the research design with structural analytical frameworks on social exclusion processes in rural areas. In this sense, from the ideas proposed by Reimer (2004) and Philip and Shuchsmith (2003), social exclusion processes in rural areas are analysed here taking into account the actions developed by the local Councils in each one of the social systems and subsystems susceptible to failures triggering exclusion. In addition, the literature review remarks mayors as the key person in the political management of local Councils in general and as a reference figure in rural communities in particular. So, this research studies the mayors’ ideas on the actions of the Councils addressing social exclusion, as it is understood that these ideas constitute a significant cognitive capital for the policy design. Thus, this research studies what Councils do and can do according to their mayors’ opinion. Therefore, the research follows a qualitative design explained in detail in Chapter 3, with primary information from semi-structured interviews with mayors from rural areas in Comunitat Valenciana which were conducted at the end of the third year of the municipal term 2011-2015. The analysis is developed in three successive stages where information is approached with different goals and techniques (Chapters 8, 9, and 10). First, there was a constructivist analysis of the corpus in order to describe the mayors’ ideas on rurality, social exclusion problems, and the role of the Councils in facing those challenges. Secondly, there is a content analysis about the Councils’ actions which is oriented by two theoretical models elaborated from: i) Reimer (2004) and Philip and Shucksmith (2003), on the social exclusion processes in rural areas; and ii) the previous analysis and Brugué and Gomà (1998), on the different local social policies strategic approaches. And finally, diversity of action among the case studies is analysed taking into account several political features of the mayors as their political sign, continuity in office, and risk of development of patronage and paternalistic practices within the Council. This analysis (Chapter 10) is made on the results of the previous analysis following the fsQCA technique developed by Ragin (2008). The results of the research include, among others, a complete catalogue of possibilities of action for rural Councils against social exclusion processes. And it shows how, despite their limited capacity to act, they have enough scope for action to design and implement different local policies for the social development of their communities.