What has become of Podemos? The elites of a radical left party and their evolving dynamics of recruitment

INTRODUCTION[Up]

In recent years, several radical left parties (RLPs) have emerged on the West and South European political scenes. The post-2008 Great Recession fuelled an important wave of protest among European democracies, which was followed by the electoral successes of pre-existing parties such as Syriza in Greece and the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, and provided an impulse for the creation of new political organisations such as Podemos in Spain (2014) or La France Insoumise (2016). Many of these parties quickly accessed a high number of seats in national and local representation, conquered governmental power (e.g. Greece in 2015) or managed to become important partners of government coalitions (e.g. Portugal in 2015 and Spain in 2019), an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of the post-communist radical left, defined as left by its commitments to equality and internationalism and radical by its orientation toward a ‘“root-and-branch” change of the political system” (‍March 2011).

This political evolution has been analysed by a growing body of literature, covering aspects as diverse as ideology and the growing appeal of the populist rhetoric within the left (‍Gomez, Morales, and Ramiro 2016; ‍Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis 2019; ‍Ramiro and Gomez 2017; ‍Visser et al. 2014), political platforms and communication (‍Casero-Ripollés, Sintes-Olivella, and Franch 2017; ‍Krause 2020), membership (‍Gomez and Ramiro 2019; ‍Tsakatika and Lisi 2013) and electoral dynamics (‍March and Rommerskirchen 2015) of RLPs. To the date however, party organization and internal party life remain some of the main shortcomings in RLP research (‍March and Keith 2016; ‍Lourenço 2021; ‍March 2017) and, in particular, almost no systematic study has been undertaken on the sociology of these parties’ elites. This may be linked to a series of recent but dominant political and scientific framings of new RLPs: these new political forces have tended to be analysed as “movement parties” (‍Della Porta et al. 2017) or as plebiscitarian machines of power (‍Cervera-Marzal 2021). A large part of the literature thus discusses the adequateness of these two labels with national or cross-national studies, either by assessing the participative and/or new dynamics of grassroots activism (‍Chironi and Fittipaldi 2017; ‍Petithomme 2020) or by focusing on the confiscation of intra-organizational power by a reduced political oligarchy (‍Gerbaudo 2021; ‍de Nadal 2021a; ‍Vittori 2022).

In order to start filling this gap on the sociology of RLP elites, this article focuses on the case of Podemos and analyses the social and political profiles of its national cadres, the party in central office (‍Katz and Mair 1993), by using a new scientific lens: a systematic prosopographic study of members of the Consejo Ciudadano Estatal [State Citizen Council] (CCE), the equivalent of a party parliament, and of the Consejo de Coordinación [Coordination Council] (CC)^[1], the equivalent of a party executive, since 2014. This focus on Podemos in the European radical left landscape appears relevant for at least two reasons. First, Podemos has been the most studied non-governing European radical left party in recent scientific literature (‍Lourenço 2021, 765), making the lack of research on its party cadres particularly striking. Second, Podemos’ relative transparency as regards internal power distribution procedures makes a systematic exploration possible — which is not necessarily the case for other major radical left parties, where co-optation and informality make systematic data collection on such matters more difficult.

Well-known theories on middle-ranking elites, such as May’s law of curvilinear disparity (‍May 1973), have emphasized the interest of working on intermediary strata of party organization, as they are organized around distinct ideological and social characteristics if compared to top elites and to grassroots members. These are important elements to analyze the party at large, and to avoid oversimplified accounts on party “identity”. In that perspective, we ambition to open the “Party in Central Office” box by comparing some attributes of distinct segments of RLP elites. By following up that lead, this study fulfils two main research objectives. First, synchronically, by confronting established accounts on Podemos elites with systematically collected data on top-of-the-top (CC) and intermediary (CCE) Podemos elites, it delves into the sociology of Podemos’ cadres when the party structures were created. Second, diachronically, by reformulating and testing existing hypotheses on the evolutions of Podemos’ cadres sociology with solid data, it analyses the evolution of these elites in the process of party institutionalization and normalization Podemos has undergone since then.

In the next pages, I first discuss the available literature on RLP cadres and formulate a set of expectations on Podemos party cadres’ sociology and trajectories in terms of party institutionalization. I then describe the data and method used in the analysis and give a brief overview of the history of Podemos party congresses since 2014, providing a few milestones to understand the evolution of the CCE and CC. I subsequently describe the main tendencies observed with this new dataset. Finally, in the discussion section, I assess the accuracy of my starting expectations on the institutionalization of Podemos, and discuss possible comparative extensions of this study to other contemporary RLP cases.

THE SOCIOLOGY OF RADICAL LEFT PARTY ELITES AND PARTY INSTITUTIONALIZATION[Up]

In the overwhelming amount of scholarship on RLPs, the intermediate level of party cadres has somehow been neglected. Yet, this dimension often appears as a central aspect of public discourse on new RLPs and is also an essential element of parties’ anti-establishment communication strategies, which regularly claim to renew representative democracy by opening professional politics to “ordinary” citizens (‍Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis 2018; ‍Nez 2022). This issue, however, is only marginally taken into consideration in empirical political research, and usually tackled with limited and impressionist accounts on party cadres’ sociology, which do not serve as a core research issue but rather as contextual elements nourishing more in depth accounts of ideological and strategic choices. The connection between ideology and sociology of party members is thus one of the blind spots of RLP research. Three dimensions in particular are often highlighted here: the connection of RLPs with social movements — partly displacing traditional party affiliation as a source of internal legitimacy (‍Chironi 2018); the connection of RLPs with academia and the growing importance attributed to academic expertise — as opposed to the progressive de-intellectualization and professionalization of European social-democratic parties (‍Bortun 2019; ‍Rioufreyt 2016); the connection of RLPs with Latin-American “pink-tide” leftist governments of the 2000s, especially in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (‍Compagnon 2017; ‍Dominguez 2017). Taken together and applied to the sociology of party elites, these elements of party identity delineate an ideal-typical image of the RLP cadre as an outsider to both traditional politics (through social movement and academic linkages) and European left traditions (through the influence of Latin America). The literature on new RLPs thus provides a set of hypotheses on party elites composition and evolution, whose salience varies in each organization but is nonetheless observable in most RLP studies. However, there is a lack of empirical and quantitative research offering a general overview on RLP cadres, and a theoretical gap remains when it comes to developing systematic tests for these hypotheses.

On a more theoretical ground, these three pre-stated features (links to social movements, academia and Latin America) of RLPs can all be described as party-external sources of legitimation, using Panebianco’s classical framework for the analysis of party organization. They are typical of non-institutionalized parties and subject to important evolutions in the course of party institutionalization:

Following Panebianco, external sources of legitimation can be opposed to internal sources of legitimation (such as length of activism in the party), and to the professionalization of party leadership around autonomous hierarchies — hence downplaying the impact of environmental linkages on organizational dynamics. Replacing external by internal sources of legitimation, and replacing amateurs by professionals would thus both contribute to party institutionalization, that we can define as a “process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability” (‍Huntington 1968, 12). In the case of contemporary RLPs, links to social movements, academia and Latin America can thus be used as proxy indicators of the alleged low institutionalization of the party, in order to test: 1) the adequateness of simplified visions of new RLP elites with the actual sociology of party cadres taken as a group; 2) the stability or instability of these characteristics over time.

This approach also offers a base for further comparative analyses on the evolution of alleged “movement-parties” and new parties in general. The political science literature has indeed highlighted different paths of institutionalization a party might undergo (‍Harmel, Svåsand, and Mjelde 2019), dealing with issues as different as charismatic authority patterns, fluctuating electoral results or access to government positions. This article focuses on a relatively understudied dimension in that perspective: external legitimation sources of party elites, whose dimensions may be context-specific (such as the probably sui generis links of Podemos with Latin America) yet can be integrated in a broader and cross-national research agenda, through a more comprehensive conception of party institutionalization. External legitimation sources are indeed at the crossroads of two of the main aspects of party institutionalization that are usually considered separately (‍Bolleyer 2023; ‍Randall and Svåsand 2002): value infusion (i.e. when party actors give value to the organization as such, not only as an instrument to achieve a set of meta-organizational goals) and autonomy (i.e. the organization’s ability to define its goals free from the influence of external actors). Frequently associated with either internal or external dimensions of party institutionalization, both value infusion and autonomy are however at stake when it comes to closing or opening the boundaries of the elite recruitment market to the environment surrounding the party.

Based on these theoretical premises, we can formulate four interconnected expectations on the sociology of RLP elites applied to the study of Podemos:

#H1: The three main socio-biographical features that characterize public discourse on RLPs when created (links to social movements, pre-eminence of academics and links to Latin America) should be reflected in the individuals recruited to the highest internal party institutions when they are launched.

Hence we expect to find a high number of individuals with these three characteristics among Consejo de Coordinación and Consejo Ciudadano Estatal members selected during Podemos’ first Citizen Assembly in 2014.

#H2: These external sources of legitimation should work as an asset in internal competition, and favour the access of individual party cadres to the highest positions in the party when it is created — hence creating a gap between different levels of party leadership.

We thus expect to find a gap between the CC and the CCE of Podemos in 2014, with higher proportions of party cadres with links to social movements, academia and Latin America in the CC.

#H3: The consolidation of party organization should be reflected in a downward trend of the three indicators, implying a reduction in the outsider profile of most members of the party elite over time.

Hence we expect to observe a decreasing proportion of Podemos cadres with links to social movements, academia and Latin America in both the CC and CCE after 2014.

#H4: The gap between intermediary and top-ranking party elites as regards external legitimacy assets should also diminish over time, reflecting an increasingly autonomous system of internal hierarchies.

Hence after 2014 we expect to observe diminishing differences among CC and the CCE members as regards links to the three pre-stated features.

DATA AND METHODS[Up]

The choice of Podemos as a case-study is dictated by its paradigmatic nature in the landscape of European RLPs in at least two aspects. First, unlike several European RLPs whose newness could be discussed, since a large part of these “new” parties are based on the transformation of pre-existing party structures that were and remained central (such as Synapsismos in Syriza, or the Parti de Gauche in La France Insoumise), or even originated in splits within social-democratic parties (such as Die Linke), Podemos appears as a purer form of new organization, a priori offering greater space for outsiders to partisan politics. Second, in comparison with its European counterparts, the growth in electoral support and access to public office was particularly quick for Podemos, thus facing the organization with immediate challenges in terms of institutionalization of its party structure. For all these reasons, Podemos appears as a perfect case-study to analyse the transformations of elite recruitment during this relatively short period of time during which RLPs obtained historical scores in multiple European elections.

This study thus relies on a prosopographic database that includes all individuals (n=189) who were ever elected to the Consejo Ciudadano Estatal of Podemos, and among which members of the Consejo de Coordinación were then coopted^[2]. The elections took place online during the Citizen Assemblies of 2014 (62 elected members + the Secretary General), 2017 (62 elected members + the Secretary General), 2020 (89 elected members + the Secretary General) and 2021 (97 elected members + the Secretary General). Officially, the CCE and the CC are Podemos’ main internal institutions, although their role may actually be considered as rather formal — especially during Pablo Iglesias’ terms as Secretary General between 2014 and 2021. Nevertheless, their composition can be considered a reflection of Podemos’ intended image towards the public sphere: it shows how certain types of profiles are highlighted or devaluated at different points in time. This is true for the party executive, but also for the party parliament: unlike Unidas Podemos’ parliamentary group (the party in public office), the CC and CCE composition are less dependent on external factors; the internal electoral and cooptation process (except in the case of the 2017 Citizen Assembly) are a mere reflection of a leading group pre-established choice. Both the CC and the CCE are thus an interesting starting point for a sociological inquiry into Podemos’ elites’ evolving characteristics. We however hypothesize that the profile of CCE members can be distinguished from that of the main popular and mediatic leaders of the organization, gathered in the CC, therefore introducing more complexity in our understanding of top-elites in general, and of Podemos elites in particular.

The data was collected using different types of publicly available sources: biographies of CCE members published on Podemos’ transparency portal; biographies and declarations of interest uploaded by candidates to the dedicated websites of each national Citizen Assembly as well as to the dedicated websites of Podemos’ successive legislative primaries or local citizen assemblies elections; biographies or CVs uploaded to other publicly accessible websites (e.g. website of the Spanish parliament, personal blogs, etc.); press coverage of CCE members in the national and local newspapers. The resulting database comprises several types of variables (socio-demographic, political trajectory, connections to Latin America, etc.)^[3]. In the subsequent analysis, I will use three sets of variables that help analyse: 1) the former political trajectory of CCE members; 2) their connections to Latin America; 3) their professional background and connections to academia. Descriptive statistics for all the variables used in the analysis are shown in Table 2 and Table 3 in the Appendix section.

In order to identify the previous political trajectory of party elites, I use four sorts of variable: 1) the proportion of former activists of any social or political organization other than Podemos; 2) the proportion of former members of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España, PCE) and its Catalan branch (Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña, PSUC), the Communist youth (Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España, UJCE) or the Catalan Communist Party (Partit dels i les Comunistes de Catalunya, PCC) and its youth branch (Juventud Comunista de Cataluña, JCC)^[4]; 3) the average number of former organizations individual members included in the database were ever part of. The counting method used for these three variables raises two sorts of challenges. First, social movement activism does not necessarily formalize into organizational membership (in a labour-union or NGO for instance), and is thus quite elusive. This is the main reason why, when discussing political trajectories of CCE members, this article stresses the evolving proportion of former communist activists rather than the hard-to-catch proportion of non-institutional social movement activists (and its attached political culture), which are often presented as zero-sume-game realities — an assumption that should itself be explored by research. Second, it should also be acknowledged that previous experience in political organizations is also difficult to track: our census mainly relies on individual declarations, cross-checked by analysing past social media involvement, activist websites and press archives — which are more abundant in the case of national and local personalities. Some data may thus be missing: however, there is no particular reason to believe this would significantly affect rough estimates and, more importantly, diachronic evolutions observed in the analysis. I also use the standard age and age groups of CCE members in each election year as a fourth variable in this section.

In order to identify the influence of Latin-American “veterans” among party cadres, I use three sorts of variable: 1) “Latin-American connection” identifies individuals with some sort of public connection with Latin America (family, studies, work experience, etc.); 2) “Bolivarian connection” identifies individuals with some sort of public connection with either Venezuela, Bolivia or Ecuador; 3) “CEPS” identifies individuals publicly involved in the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Sociales, a foundation that realized training and consulting missions for left-leaning political forces in Latin-America in the 1990s and 2000s.

In order to identify the influence of academics within party elites and compare it to other groups’ influence, I use three types of variable: 1) the “academics” variable identifies any sort of people involved in university or research, including people whose main occupation is not teaching or research; 2) the education variable, which is expressed as a categorical variable divided as follows: no higher than secondary education, professional diploma, university studies no higher than Bachelor or equivalent, no higher than Master, PhD; 3) the “type of occupation” variable, which is a categorical variable divided as follows: knowledge workers (merging students, teachers, lecturers, professors or researchers); legal professions; remunerated politicians (either elected representatives, parliamentary assistants or party employees); other.

THE SELECTION PROCESS OF PODEMOS CCE AND CC MEMBERS SINCE 2014: A BRIEF OVERVIEW[Up]

Podemos was launched as a political movement in January 2014. After organizing open primaries which gave the lead to Pablo Iglesias, a young political science professor and TV presenter, Podemos carried out a remarkably successful electoral campaign, and collected 7,98% of the vote and 5 seats in the European Parliamentary elections of May 2014.

The first Citizen Assembly of Podemos took place in October 2014 to define the organizational principles of the party. Pablo Iglesias’ platform, Claro que podemos [Of course we can], which gave more power to the Secretary General, collected 80% of the internal vote. Sumando podemos [Adding up we can], the organizational platform supported by Pablo Echenique and the anticapitalist sector of the party, Izquierda Anticapitalista, which gave more power to local circles, was chosen by only 12% of voters. The power of grassroots activists was thus downplayed to build an electoral “war machine” around the charismatic leadership of Pablo Iglesias. This result was followed by the election of the first Consejo Ciudadano Estatal of Podemos, composed of the Secretary General, 62 members elected by the citizen assembly and the regional coordinators of the party. Only one list, led by Iglesias, ran for this election. 12 CCE members were coopted to form the Consejo de Coordinación, together with the Secretary General.

In December 2015, in the general election, Podemos received 20,7% of the vote and obtained 69 seats out of 350, becoming the third largest party in the Spanish parliament. In the following weeks, Podemos refused to join a coalition government with PSOE and the centre-right party Ciudadanos, and no majority came out of this elected parliament. New elections were thus held in June 2016, for which Podemos formed a coalition with Izquierda Unida (IU), a political organization dominated by the Partido Comunista de España [Spanish Communist Party] (PCE), under the label Unidos Podemos [United we can], and received 21,2% of the vote. The results in this second election were considered disappointing, since the PSOE leadership over left-wing voters was not overthrown and the IU-Podemos coalition obtained worse results than both parties when they ran separately in the previous election.

Internally, Podemos started experiencing a growing conflict over ideological positioning and party alliances. Two of the main founding members, Iñigo Errejón and Pablo Iglesias started to confront each other publicly: the former promoted a left populist agenda, based on the original identity of Podemos and a rejection of the IU-Podemos coalition, while the latter defended a left unitarian agenda, with a more traditional left discourse. These two positions confronted in the second citizen assembly of Podemos in October 2017. Iglesias won this internal contest, securing around 60% in the election and 37 seats in the newly elected CCE. The errejonista sector arrived second, with 37% and 23 seats, while the anticapitalistas, who had run on an independent list, obtained 2 seats and 3% of the vote. 15 CCE members were coopted to form the new CC, together with the Secretary General.

The subsequent history of Podemos combines a decline in electoral support, an affirmation of Iglesias’ stranglehold at all the levels of party structure and several waves of “exit” of internal opponents. After 2019, Podemos and PSOE signed a government pact, several members of Podemos became ministers and Iglesias was appointed vice-president of government. In the meantime, both the errejonista and the anticapitalista sectors had left the party, either formally or informally. The third citizen assembly of may 2020 confirmed Iglesias’ leadership over Podemos, and renewed the CCE membership with 90 appointed seats, all of them secured by Iglesias’ list, with a 92% of the vote. 20 CCE members were coopted to form the CC, together with the Secretary General.

In March 2021, Iglesias resigned from the vice-presidency of government to run for the Madrid regional election to take place in May. After acknowledging the disappointing results in this contest, Podemos arriving only fifth (with 7,2 % and 10 seats), he resigned from both his responsibilities as MP and as Secretary General of Podemos. In June 2021, a fourth citizen assembly was organized to elect a new Secretary General and renew the CCE, bringing Ione Belarra to the head of the party. Her list obtained all the 97 CCE seats to be filled, with 88% of the vote. 25 CCE members were coopted to form the new CC, together with the Secretary General (‍Plaza-Colodro and Ramiro 2023).

PODEMOS, A PARTY OF OUTSIDERS?[Up]

This section describes the evolutions of elite recruitment in Podemos since 2014 based on our prosopographic data. To this purpose, the three main sources of external legitimacy usually associated with radical left parties (links with social movements in previous activist trajectories, influence of Latin America, over-representation of academics) are assessed. For each dimension, we first provide an empirical state of the art related to Podemos before presenting our findings.

DISCUSSION[Up]

Going back to our previously formulated expectations, we find that #H1 is confirmed, while #H2, #H3 and #H4 are partly confirmed.

As regards #H1, we observe that external sources of legitimacy were strongly reflected in both the Consejo de Coordinación and the Consejo Ciudadano Estatal when Podemos was created in 2014. All the indicators here considered confirm this expectation: most members of Podemos elites’ activist experiences had taken place outside parties represented in parliament; a very high proportion among them had links with Latin America; academics were a massive minority among CCE members and a majority among CC members. All these elements thus point to a high prevalence of political-outsider profiles among Podemos party cadres in 2014.

#H2 deals with the impact of external legitimacy assets in internal party promotion in 2014, measured by the difference between scores of CC members, the highest hierarchy in Podemos’ institutions, and scores of CCE members, the intermediate level of national leadership. This expectation is partly confirmed by the prosopographic dataset (see Table 4 in the Appendix): its does not provide consistent results as regards links to social movements, but shows strong correlations between access to the CC and links to academia and Latin America

#H3 deals with the institutionalization of party organization and the transformation of party elite profiles between 2014 and 2021, by analysing trends of party cadre outsider-ness during that period in both the CCE and the CC. In this perspective, party institutionalization should lead to a downward trend of outsider-ness indicators over time, a tendency that we can confirm in two out of three indicators (see Tables 2 and 3 in the Appendix). Our expectation, inconclusive as regards links to social movements, is nevertheless confirmed in relation to the two other indicators. A majority of indicators thus confirm there is a reduction in the outsider profile of Podemos’ elites between 2014 and 2021, associated with the institutionalization of the party; the interactions between elite membership and social movement linkages are more complex to assess here.

#H4, which focuses on the evolution of the gap between the CC and the CCE, is also partly confirmed by the prosopographic dataset (see Figure 4). Unsurprisingly given the confusing trend followed by social movement linkages as analysed with #H3, this indicator also provides limited results in expressing the evolution of differences between CC and CCE members over time (see Table 4 in the Appendix). If we set aside this set of variables, we however find evidence that party outsider-ness ceases being an asset in internal party competition, thus reflecting an increasingly autonomous system of party hierarchies. Indeed, two of the external sources of legitimacy that used to facilitate the access to Podemos elites have lost their influx over time, thus confirming the expectation of an institutionalization process favouring autonomous party hierarchies.

Overall, our evidence suggests that Podemos has undergone a transformation process: founded as a party of outsiders, where external legitimacy assets were strongly valued in party promotion, it has evolved into a more self-centred organization with increasingly thick borders. Value infusion and the autonomization of the party from its environment have made the access to leadership positions more and more difficult to individuals with fewer party credentials. This has made academic experience and links to Latin America less powerful in favouring party promotion, while opening the party hierarchy to more diverse professional/educational profiles and regional origins. Paradoxically, this closure of party elite has made Podemos cadres more similar to the average Spanish citizen on some aspects, while making Podemos a less “alternative” political organization at the same time, since internal promotion is now more closely associated with previous experience in the party than with other assets.

These results can be used to discuss some widely voiced concerns about Podemos after 2017, when many accused the organization of being infiltrated by former communists or even by the PCE, thus backsliding from a “true” citizen-based movement-party into an empty shell manipulated by radical-left apparatchiks, incarnating the “old politics” of the left. This evolution is not confirmed in our empirical analysis of party elite recruitment since 2014, where communists and former communists do not appear as central in the evolutions of Podemos’ cadres taken as a whole. However, our results confirm the idea that Podemos, once so exceptional in its valuing of outsider profiles, has turned more and more into a closed political market, thus displacing political amateurs from its centres of power.

Between 2014 and 2019, this institutionalization process went hand in hand with (first) a growth and (later) a stabilization of electoral support for the party, with the conquest of important positions at the city and regional level, as well as with the access to governmental positions at the national level (‍Barberà and Barrio 2019). On this matter, Podemos’ trajectory after 2019 has been marked by a quick and strong decay: in the context of less favourable coalition negotiations with its partners on the radical left, Podemos fell from 35 members of parliament in 2019 to only 5 in 2023, and lost all its positions in the national government — most of the city and regional positions of power had already been lost in the meantime. These evolutions raise the issue of the continued institutionalization of Podemos, especially given that our data collection stopped in 2021, when the last party congress (here called Citizen Assembly) took place. Further research on Podemos party cadres should take these evolutions of electoral support into account when analysing the results of the next party congress, which should take place in 2024. These tendencies were nevertheless partly observable since the 2020 Citizen assembly, which was already marked by the slackening of Podemos’ electoral success and a reduction of the number of its MPs (from roughly 70 to 35). However, in 2020 and 2021, this decline in electoral support and reduction of the party in public office (partly compensated by the integration of Podemos into a national governmental coalition) had not coincided with a reaffirmation of external sources of legitimacy in cadre recruitment. The 2024 Citizen assembly may thus offer an interesting viewpoint to observe the continued interactions between different aspects of party institutionalization: electoral success on the one hand, value infusion and autonomy of the party from its environment on the other hand.

These observations can also be connected to a more theoretical discussion on the effects of electoral performance on the institutionalization of political parties. The interactions between electoral success and party organization have predominantly been studied in terms of how a “good” or “strong” organization favours electoral success (‍Cirhan 2024; ‍Tavits 2012). Our analysis suggests that, following previous research on party organizational strength (‍Aldrich 1995; ‍Lowry 2009), taking the reverse perspective might offer interesting insights into the recent history of radical left parties, by tracking how and to what extent the fluctuations in electoral results affect party autonomy and value infusion. Good electoral performances usually provide extra resources for the party, enabling it to both offer rewards to political insiders and to integrate outsiders to its elite to maintain the “anti-party” or “party-movement” image of the organization. This is particularly true for newly formed organizations, which include fewer “insiders”, such as Podemos in 2014 and 2017. On the contrary, bad electoral performances may have two contradictory effects. First, the associated reduction in the flow of resources may reduce the ability of the party to provide rewards: it will thus tend to give priority to rewarding “organic” members of the organization over outsider profiles. This could partly account for the evolution of Podemos’ elite recruitment in 2020 and 2021 (a tendency whose coherence should be checked after the next party congress). But the reduction in the flow of resources associated with bad electoral performances may also have a second effect, by creating incentives for the party to reorganize recruitment procedures and, especially in the case of new radical left parties, to re-open the borders of internal competition to outsiders — making efforts to regenerate their original image as “alternative” political movements. Podemos’ evolution from 2014 to 2021 does not show such evolutions, but this should (again) be checked in future CCs and CCEs, since time may have non-linear effects on the strategy of parties confronted to bad electoral performances.

CONCLUSIONS[Up]

Overall, the exploration of the social and political characteristics of Podemos’ Consejo Ciudadano Estatal and Consejo de Coordinación members confirms the idea that, looking beyond the organization’s main individual leaders to take a grasp at national party cadres, this new radical left party was indeed a party with a strong proportion of outsiders when it was created in 2014. If we take aside activism in far-left protest parties with no electoral representation, only a minority among early party cadres had an experience in partisan politics before joining Podemos. Former communist activists such as Pablo Iglesias have played a significant role in party genesis at top leadership levels, but they were nevertheless a minority among national elites. In the meantime, Latin-American veterans and academics had a strong presence in the party, incarnating Podemos’ image of a new party made of outsiders and “ordinary” people, understood as non-professional politicians in particular, and of its consequences on elite recruitment. These last two sets of variables even worked as a bonus in terms of hierarchical distinction between CCE and CC members: having external sources of legitimacy such as links with Latin America and academia increased the probability of reaching top leadership positions in the party.

As regards the evolution of these characteristics, three main tendencies have been identified. First, a new generation of activists who never participated in any other organization has integrated Podemos’ elites after 2014. This reflects the creation and progressive strengthening of a self-sufficient party culture that clearly opposes Podemos’ initial anchorage in a diversity of social movements. Second, there is a decreasing proportion of Latin-American veterans among party elites. Podemos is still a party of Latin-American “nerds”, probably like any other radical left party in Europe, but not with the astonishingly high intensity observed during party genesis. Third, there is a decreasing proportion of academics and knowledge workers among party cadres, compensated by a surge in remunerated politicians, while the other professions remain stable. This can be considered the main sociological evidence of Podemos’ institutionalization or “normalization”, and of the impoverishment of its environmental links: external legitimacy sources play a decreasing role in internal party promotion.

An interesting aspect of these results is that the process of institutionalization of Podemos, here analysed in terms of value infusion and autonomy in the selection of party cadres, coincides with a deterioration of Podemos’ electoral performances. If this partly surprising correlation is to be confirmed in the next Podemos Citizen Assembly, as could be expected after the drastic reduction of Podemos’ share of MPs in the 2023 Spanish national elections, it could fuel further research on the complex interactions between different faces of party institutionalization that are often seen as convergent: electoral success and growth of the party in public office on the one hand, autonomy and value infusion on the other hand.

These reflections could also pave the way for further comparative research on new RLPs and their trajectories of institutionalization. Replicating our prosopographic approach of Podemos cadres to other organizations could help generate knowledge on the value attributed to outsider-ness within different parties, and its evolutions over time. More specifically, this comparative approach could help measure and differentiate the effect of two different variables on the evolving dynamics of elite recruitment: time and changing electoral performances. Indeed, to the extent that they show the negative effects of institutionalization on the “outsider-ness” of RLP cadres’ social profiles, our observations go beyond the simple Podemos case-study. All else being equal, it can be expected that the sociology of elites of new European RLPs will show a similar trajectory as regards linkage to social movements and academia over time, confirming hypotheses already formulated by the literature on other aspects of party life (‍Groz 2020; ‍March 2017; ‍Tsakatika and Lisi 2013). The case of Latin American influence and “veteranship” may be a little different, since its magnitude in Podemos’ formative years seems quite sui generis: ongoing research on other European parties such as La France Insoumise however tends to show this dynamic may also be observable outside Spain (‍Copello 2022). Further research comparing the sociology of RLP cadres could help enrich these promising insights, either by operationalizing the exact same indicators in other parties, or by using other indicators of cadre “outsider-ness” adapted to context specificities. Apart from confirming the effects of time on party closure, undertaking comparative research on RLPs could also help understand the exact role played by (good or bad) electoral performances in the shaping of party organization and the ability of the party to open its elite circles to political outsiders.

Such replications to other case-studies might however face major challenges, not so much because of local/national specificities of Podemos as regards external sources of legitimacy, but in relation with data-building possibilities. Indeed, in spite of its quick process of verticalization, Podemos has maintained transparent election processes to select its national elites, making a systematic data-based analysis possible. This is not necessarily the case in other emblematic European radical left movements such as La France Insoumise or the Parti du Travail de Belgique, with higher levels of informality, co-optation and secrecy and lower levels of synchronization in the selection of party cadres. Future systematic research into the sociology and trajectories of RLP cadres will thus be conditioned by the parties’ diverse modes of organization — a variable that is itself an element to be analysed.