The gender politics of populist parties in Southern Europe

Abstract

The article examines the gender politics of populist parties in two countries historically marked by cultural traditionalism – Italy and Spain. It defines and compares the articulation of gender issues cross-nationally and intra-ideologically to understand how populist parties contest the politics of gender in the two countries. Drawing on computer-assisted qualitative content analyses of programmatic documents, it assesses the framing and salience of gender by the populist radical left (the Spanish Podemos) and right (Lega and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy; VOX in Spain), while also accounting for an ideologically ambiguous populist party (the Italian Movimento 5 Stelle). It concludes ascertaining the different salience of gender politics among Italian and Spanish populist parties and evinces multiple axes of programmatic proximity and distance – not only cross-nationally, but also intra-ideologically among parties akin.

Keywords:

• Gender
• populism
• radical left
• radical right
• policy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our work and for their perceptive and constructive comments. We also wish to extend our gratitude to the editors of the journal for their support throughout the process. Andrea Pirro would like to acknowledge the support from the European University Institute; part of this work was carried out during his visiting fellowship at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 With the sole exception of the Lega (founded in 1991), all populist parties included in this study are relatively ‘new’. The M5S was established in 2009, FdI in 2012, VOX in 2013, and Podemos in 2014. The Lega however completed its transformation into a populist radical-right party since Matteo Salvini stepped in as federal secretary in late 2013, thus offering further grounds to consider the timespan of reference as our period of analysis.

2 This is how Podemos refers to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex people across its programmatic documents. We otherwise use the acronym ‘LGBTQI+’ throughout the article.

3 The family quotient is a mechanism allowing calculation of due taxation on the basis of all family members’ incomes, therefore favouring large families.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Lavizzari

Anna Lavizzari is Ramón y Cajal research fellow in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Department of Political Science and Administration, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research interests include social movements and contentious politics, gender studies, LGBTQI + rights and youth political participation. [[email protected]]

Andrea L. P. Pirro

Andrea L. P. Pirro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. He is editor of the journal East European Politics and editor of the Routledge Book Series in Extremism and Democracy. He is convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Summer School on ‘Concepts and Methods for Research on Far-Right Politics’ and has previously served as Steering Committee chair of the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy. [[email protected]]