The Government is responsible before the Parliament (Cortes Generales), and more precisely before the Congress of the Deputies, a body which elects the Prime Minister or dismisses them through a motion of censure.

More specifically, the Spanish Constitution describes Spain's form of government as monarquía parlamentaria,[4] or parliamentary monarchy, in which the monarch acts as a moderator rather than a source of executory authority.

Spain possesses an asymmetric bicameral parliament, called the Cortes Generales, composed of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate.

The Spanish monarch, currently King Felipe VI, is the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, former King Juan Carlos I suppressed the 23-F Spanish coup d'état attempt in February 1981, showing that the monarch has more power than the constitution grants him.

These prerogatives range from the signing of international treaties, to declaring war and making peace or to dissolving the parliament.

Although the monarch is not part of the executive power, the prime minister has weekly meetings with him to inform him about the Government's activity and the King can express his opinion.

With this constitutional precept it was intended that the succession of one Government by another does not affect the fundamental continuity of the governmental action or that paralysis or dysfunctions occur in the system as a whole.

Faced with this situation, the Congress denounced the Executive Power before the Constitutional Court for refusing to submit to its control and, on 22 November 2018, the high court ruled that the Government "undermined the constitutional attribution" that the Constitution confers on Congress and that although "control of the Government's action will normally be exercised within the framework of the confidence that must exist between the Government and the Congress of Deputies", this does not mean that "exceptionally, as are the periods in which there is no relationship of trust between Congress and the Government, the aforementioned control function can not be exercised" since "the control function that corresponds to the Cortes Generales is implicit in its representative character and in the form of parliamentary government that establishes Article 1.3 of the Constitution, not being able to deny the Chambers all exercise of the control function, since this would affect to the balance of powers foreseen in our Constitution".

[20] The Office of the Prime Minister as well as the official headquarters of the Government are located in the Palace of Moncloa, outside Madrid.

According to the Constitution, the Government is the only body that can make the Budget bill, although it is the parliament who must accept it, reject it or propose modifications.

Since the approval of the Constitution of 1978, Spain was established as a decentralized unitary country which grants its regions a high degree of autonomy.

A year later, seven more regions were granted autonomy: Aragon, the Canary Islands, Castile-La Mancha, Navarre, Murcia and La Rioja.