In the Spanish case, the legal framework for the governance of religious diversity has its foundations in the historical church-state model. In political science, the theory explaining how historical patterns can influence new policy outcomes is called path dependency. Similarly, there have been many studies linking the governance of Islam in European countries to pre-existing church-state models. During Franco's dictatorship, the Spanish state signed the Concordat of 1953 with the Vatican, which granted the Catholic Church with some privileges such as state funding and the exemption from government taxation. In the Spanish transition to democracy, the government replicated the same model by signing new agreements in 1976 and 1979, which gave the concordat the status of an international treaty.