Feminist Politics and Left-Populist Parties. An Ethnographic Study of Podemos

• In Event: Political Ethnography and Fieldwork in the Study of Contemporary Populism

Abstract

Using the case of the Spanish political party Podemos, this paper examines the possibilities
and challenges to implement feminist politics within a left populist party. Embracing populism in response to the legitimation crisis of the ruling political class, Podemos commits to a gender-informed interpretation of democratic renewal based on the “feminization of politics.” Podemos leaders define this political regeneration as the implementation of alternative
practices to the dominant “masculinized” and “patriarchal politics.” These alternative practices include promoting collaborative and decentralized leaderships, practicing consensus decision-
making, implementing horizontal and bottom-up democratic structures, and encouraging dialogue and compromise with a plurality of actors.

Building upon research on the interrelation among equality theory, institutional practice,
and party culture, I use participant observation and semi-structured interviews with party
grassroots members to examine the implementation of the feminization of politics in Podemos’
internal organization. This ethnographic approach relies on an emic perspective to provide
insight into the everyday, intra-party dynamics of self-identified populist parties, especially
regarding the relation between the leaders and the grassroots members—which, ultimately, are
the “people” that populist leaders claim to represent. Besides, a participative methodology is
particularly helpful to reveal the gendered party culture that pervades populist organizations.

My analysis identifies a series of patterns within Podemos’ organization that contradict the
feminization of politics, such as top-down structures, adversarial dynamics, charismatic and
masculine leaderships, and the prioritization of bureaucracy and institutional politics. I argue
that the discrepancy between Podemos’ discourse and practices reveals how the party
privileges a specific understanding of empowerment of the ‘people,’ characterized by the tacit
acceptance of dominant masculine traits—such as competition, confrontation and hierarchy—
as both normative in political power relations, and unavoidable features of political
organization, communication, and leadership. The translation of this notion of empowerment
into the prioritization of electoral politics, political communication and strategy leads Podemos
to reproduce the same gendered culture of traditional and mainstream parties that the party
openly problematizes.

Author

• Paloma Caravantes-Gonzalez, Rutgers University