Who Represents the Poor? The Corrective Potential of Populism in Spain

ABSTRACT

Scholarly research assumes populism enhances democratic inclusion by giving voice to groups that are not represented by political elites and by obliging them to be more attentive to their preferences. Empirical studies have focused on this dynamic more indirectly looking at the emergence of new conflict dimensions, leaving the representation of marginalised groups underexplored. This article contributes to filling this gap by analysing party competition over poverty responsiveness at the regional level in Spain during the Great Recession. Combining Regional Manifestos Project data with issue sub-categorisation, the article shows that populist parties, which emerged during the economic crisis, represent the poor to a greater degree in their political agenda than establishment parties. At the same time, the latter have reacted to new competitors by being more attentive to the poor in their political discourse. As a result, supply-side adaption to include proposals tackling poverty and social exclusion increased the representation of the poor in regional spaces of political competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• poverty
• responsiveness
• representation
• Spain

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the special issue editors Annika Werner and Heiko Giebler as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Special thanks also go to Sonia Alonso and Braulio Gómez.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Matthias Scantamburlo is postdoctoral researcher at Aston University (Birmingham) and team member of the Regional Manifestos Project (RMP). He completed his doctorate at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) with a dissertation focusing on regionalist parties and multi-dimensional electoral competition. His major research interests include territorial politics, political parties, regionalism and democratic regeneration at the sub-state level. He has published in journals such as Regional and Federal Studies, West European Politics and Representation. E-mail: [email protected]

ORCID

Matthias Scantamburlo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9658-616X

Notes

1 While there is a lot of scientific debate about who actually profits, it has been argued that universal welfare regimes benefit the ‘middle class’ more than any other group (Fernández-Albertos & Manzano, 2012). Leaving these debates aside, what matters for this article is the political logic behind group-specific policies.

2 A comparison of party manifesto data from the MARPOR and the RMP (see below) in the period under analysis (2007-2017) shows that the salience of welfare issues in regional party manifestos (19.23; SD 6.51) is significantly (p < 0.01) higher than in national party manifestos (15.54; SD 4.96).

3 This is related to more comprehensive studies, which show that welfare issues do not serve to differentiate between the left and right as it is frequently mentioned across the ideological spectrum (Benoit and Däubler 2014).

4 While Podemos entered all regional parliaments, Ciudadanos failed to enter in Castile-La Mancha, the Canary Islands and Navarre in 2015 and in the Basque Country and Galicia in 2016.

5 I rely on data from the Spanish national statistical institute (INE).

6 The coefficient of variation is the standard deviation divided by the mean and allows knowing if a sample is dispersed or concentrated. If the variation ratio is >0.30, the data is considered to be dispersed. If it is <0.30, the data is concentrated around the mean.

7 The results are robust to the inclusion of party dummies, the usage of a different poverty measure (the AROPE indicator), the exclusion of outlier cases and control variables.

Additional information

Funding

The work reported in this article has been partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad), Project: ‘Regional Manifestos Project’ [CSO2015-64495-R].