Measuring Populism in Spain: content and discourse analysis of Spanish Political Parties

ABSTRACT

The rise of populist parties across Europe is shaking the foundations of Representative Democracy, of which Spain is a particular example: decades of bipartisanship have been broken amidst a territorial, economic and social crisis, with new parties rising on the left and the right side of the spectrum. The aim of this paper is to analyse the Spanish political scenario and find which (if any) parties classify as populist and what are the other ideological traits of this (or these) parties, by means of both content and discourse analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Spain
• Populism
• democracy
• content analysis
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Lukáš Lehotský and Veronika Zapletalová for their comments, and in particular for the guidance and feedback of my PhD supervisor Vít Hlousek.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Particularly interesting for Populism is the concept of people, which uses its lack of definition as a common unification device. In this sense, the idea of ‘the people’ is a metaphor for something that cannot be referred literally, much alike modern currency. Proper functioning of modern monetary systems based on debt rely first and foremost on people’s confidence (that is, that they do not attempt to change their currencies into gold -if that were even possible legally speaking), and money acts as a metaphor of everything that can be bought. Populism uses the same system with people, which becomes a metaphor for everything good and every demand individuals might have, and works in the most effective way when no attempt is made to reduce it to any literal meaning, therefore opening who can be included or excluded (Solá and Rendueles 2017). In this sense, e.g. Villacañas (2015), argues that populism has managed to find a substitute for the unifying narrative of Marxism where the destruction of private property was the demand that unified any other possible one.

2. In reference to the political system of the Bourbonic restoration between the 1870s and 1923, where two parties took turns to occupy power (the so-called dynastic parties), imitating the British system. However, as the designers of the system were not sure of how that would work in Spain, they created a whole corrupt scheme to ensure that no one outside those parties could get effective political power -despite the adoption of universal suffrage in the 20th century).

3. ‘Vivan las caenas (sic)’, literally ‘hail the chains’ or ‘long live the chains’ was a motto of the absolutists against the liberals during the political struggles of the Spanish 19th Century, although over time it became a derogatory term used by the latter group against the first one.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic).