‘We are Different': do Anti-establishment Parties Promote Distinctive Elites? An Analysis of the Spanish Case

ABSTRACT

Since the Great Recession, new parties challenged the pre-eminence of mainstream parties in many European democracies. In this paper we wonder to what extent this challenge translates in the representative politics. This paper aims to evaluate whether a) in terms of descriptive representation, the new challenger parties renewed the composition of the Parliaments; b) new challenger parties belonging to different ideological families elect different élites. The analysis focuses on two new successful anti-establishment parties: Podemos and Ciudadanos. Podemos belongs to the radical left family while Ciudadanos is a centre-right liberal party. We have built a dataset of the representatives of these two parties and the two other mainstream parties (PP and PSOE) in the Congress (2016), in the Autonomous Communities (2015) and in the Party in Central Office. Our findings suggest that Podemos and C’s elites are younger and better educated compared to mainstream parties. Yet, we found that beyond their common anti-establishment background, different core ideologies matter when it comes to other aspects of the descriptive representation: in terms of education and working background, Podemos and C’s élites are more similar to their ideologically closer parties, rather than among each other, thus highlighting the irrelevance of the shared anti-establishment rhetoric.

KEYWORDS:

• Political representation
• new parties
• elites

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 The opposition between the “people” and the “elite” is a central element of populism, as a wide literature has demonstrated (see Zulianello, 2020). In this regard, however, Barr (2009, p. 31) underlined that “such rhetoric is but one aspect of the populist phenomenon”. While Podemos has often been defined as a left-populist party, in this article, we use the definition of anti-establishment party, as we focus only on this dimension of populism.

2 After the European elections, vote intention polls for the general elections indicated a substantial increase in consensus for Podemos. However, given the nature of the European elections, observers were divided among those who saw Podemos as a 'souffle destined to deflate' or, conversely, as a 'tsunami' destined to completely change the Spanish political scenario (Torreblanca, 2015, 10).

3 CIS refers to “high” education (called superiores), thus it is not possible to evaluate how many voters have a university degree or higher levels of educations (masters, PhD).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No. 773023]

Notes on contributors

Valeria Tarditi

Valeria Tarditi teaches Political Science at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Calabria. She was previously post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. Her main research interests deal with political parties, euroscepticism and most recently with local government and administration. She has published articles on these topics in national and international journals including Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Swiss Political Science Review, Italian Political Science Review. E-mail: [email protected]

Davide Vittori

Davide Vittori is a Post-Doc fellow at Université Libre de Bruxelles (CEVIPOL Department). He was previously post-doc and t.a. at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. He is a contributor for the Italian Center of Electoral Studies. He holds a PhD in ‘Politics: theory, history and science’ at LUISS University. His first monography (in Italian) is ‘Il Valore di Uno’ (2020, LUISS University Press). His works appear on Comparative European Politics, Swiss Political Science Review, Italian Political Science Review, European Political Science, among others. His main research interests are voting behaviour, political parties, populism and comparative political systems. E-mail: [email protected]