Mapping Religious Governance in Spain: Federations and Their Territorial and Institutional Organization

Federations appear to play a relevant role in religious governance in Spain, acting as the collective representation of religious communities recognised by public authorities. Although they were formerly intended to interact with the national government through the signing of Cooperation Agreements and participation in the Advisory Committee on Religious Diversity, religious federations have increasingly developed a territorial projection towards Spain’s Autonomous Communities. This article explores how these organisations operate within Spain’s political and governance framework. To do so, it examines these territorial strategies by analysing a dataset of 129 federations across the 17 Autonomous Communities and the two Autonomous Cities (N = 19). Using descriptive statistics and Spearman correlation, the study maps the organisational patterns of these entities. The findings point to the predominance of nested federative organisations, alongside the presence of non-nested structures concentrated in territorially and institutionally dense regions. The coexistence of these two models cannot be accounted for solely by religious pluralism; institutional strategies also appear to play a part. While the dataset captures registered federations, informal coordination mechanisms remain beyond the scope of this analysis. Taken together, the article advances current debates on religious governance by offering the first systematic territorial mapping of federative organisational patterns in Spain.