As a result, Adolfo Suárez went on to form a minority government, depending on support from Manuel Fraga's Democratic Coalition, which experienced an electoral decline.

[1][2] Voting for the Cortes Generales was on the basis of universal suffrage, which comprised all nationals over 18 years of age and in full enjoyment of their political rights.

[3][4][5] For the Congress of Deputies, 348 seats were elected using the D'Hondt method and a closed list proportional representation, with an electoral threshold of three percent of valid votes—which included blank ballots—being applied in each constituency.

[3][6] The use of the electoral method resulted in an effective threshold based on the district magnitude and the distribution of votes among candidacies.

[10][11] The law provided for by-elections to fill Congress seats only when the results in a particular constituency were annulled by a final court's decision deriving from the election's legal challenge procedures; additionally for the Senate, by-elections were required to fill any seat vacated up to two years into the legislature's term.

The prime minister had the prerogative to propose the monarch to dissolve both chambers at any given time—either jointly or separately—and call a snap election, provided that no motion of no confidence was in process, no state of emergency was in force and that dissolution did not occur before one year had elapsed since the previous one.

Causes of ineligibility were imposed on the president and members of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Council of State and the Court of Auditors; the Ombudsman; high-ranking members—undersecretaries, secretaries-general, directors-general and chiefs of staff—of the General State Administration, government delegations, the Social Security and other government agencies; judges and public prosecutors in active service; Armed Forces and police corps personnel in active service; members of electoral commissions; and the chairs of national trade unions; as well as a number of territorial-level officers in the aforementioned government bodies and institutions being barred from running, during their tenure of office, in constituencies within the whole or part of their respective area of jurisdiction.