1914 Spanish general election

A general election was held in Spain on Sunday, 8 March (for the Congress of Deputies) and on Sunday, 22 March 1914 (for the Senate), to elect the members of the 15th Cortes under the Spanish Constitution of 1876, during the Restoration period. All 408 seats in the Congress of Deputies were up for election, as well as 180 of 360 seats in the Senate.

The informal turno system—which had allowed the country's two main parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, to alternate in power by determining election outcomes in advance through caciquism and electoral fraud—broke down following Antonio Maura's downfall in 1909, as the latter had come to see the Liberal rise to power as the liquidation of the Pact of El Pardo. The government of Prime Minister José Canalejas attempted to enforce a liberal democratic regenerationism to curb the country's problems, seeing the abolition of consumption taxes, the introduction of compulsory military service, laws addressing the social question, the legal groundwork for the establishment of the Commonwealth of Catalonia in order to placate rising Catalan regionalism and the establishment of a Spanish protectorate in Morocco. But his assassination before he could fully realize his agenda (such as fulfilling the separation of church and state or the rebuilding of the turno with the Conservatives) plunged his plans—and his party—into chaos.

King Alfonso XIII entrusted the Count of Romanones with the formation of a new cabinet, but an internal crisis over the leadership of the Liberal Party prompted supporters of the Marquis of Alhucemas to split into the Liberal Democratic Party. As a result, Romanones's government fell in October 1913 after being defeated in a vote of confidence. Maura rejected the King's mandate to continue the turno, leading to the appointment of Eduardo Dato as prime minister instead. This fragmented the Conservative Party into the Maurists (followers of Maura's doctrine), the "suitable ones" (defenders of the turno system) and the Ciervists (who advocated for Conservative unity of action without affiliating themselves with either faction).

The election saw the Conservative bloc winning a majority of seats in both chambers, but internal infighting between the Maurist and Datist factions would leave the government in an unstable minority position. The Liberals ran divided between the supporters of Romanones and the liberal-democratic faction of the Marquis of Alhucemas. The Republican–Socialist Conjunction had been weakened by the departures of both the Reformist Party of Melquíades Álvarez (representing a moderate republicanism) and Alejandro Lerroux's Radical Republican Party.