Left-wing populism and feminist politics: the case of Evo Morales' Bolivia (2006-2018)
- Autores: Pablo Castaño Tierno
- Directores de la Tesis: Eva Anduiza Perea (dir. tes.), Margarita León Ramon-Borja (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Emanuela Lombardo (presid.), Maria Caterina La Barbera (secret.), Jeffery Webber (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia Política, Políticas Públicas y Relaciones Internacionales / Politics, Policies and International Relations por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
The relationship between populism and feminist politics is increasingly receiving more scholarly attention. However, this stream of literature presents two major shortcomings. First, it has so far failed to establish a specific relationship between populism and feminist politics. Second, the literature has overwhelmingly focused on right-wing populist parties, the relationship between left-wing populism and feminist politics is understudied. The present thesis contributes to filling this gap by analysing the relationship between left-wing populism and feminist politics, focusing on the paradigmatic case of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and Evo Morales’ government in Bolivia between 2006 and 2018.
Some of the most influential works on populism and feminist politics uphold that these two political projects are essentially incompatible: according to this literature, populist parties never promote gender equality policies or keep good relations with women’s movements, regardless of whether they are left-wing or right-wing populists. I challenge this assertion by analysing three specific aspects of the relationship between left-wing populism and feminist politics. First, I investigate whether left-wing populist parties promote gender equality policies in some cases. Second, I analyse how these parties form their policy-making coalitions in the field of gender equality. Third, I investigate how much impact on policy institutionalised women’s movements have when left-wing populist parties are in power. The empirical analysis carried out in this thesis is based on the qualitative content analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews with women’s movements’ activists, policy-makers and experts in women’s movements.
The findings and conclusions of the thesis can be synthetized as follows. Regarding the promotion of gender equality policies, the analysis has revealed that Evo Morales’ left-wing populist government promoted ambitious gender equality policies on violence against women in politics, gender-based domestic violence, and domestic workers’ rights, among other fields. These findings show that left-wing populists can promote gender equality policies, and contradicts the literature that upholds that there is an essential incompatibility between any populist ideology and the promotion of gender equality policies. In regards to populist governments forming policy coalitions in the field of gender equality, the analysis has shown that the Bolivian government and governing party MAS experienced a contradiction between their anti-elitist discourse and their pragmatism when forming policy coalitions – they included feminist NGOs in the coalitions for the formulation of gender equality policies, even though the government had previously labelled those NGOs as elitist. As far as the relationship between left-wing populist parties and women’s movements is concerned, I have focused on the case of the Bolivian domestic workers’ movement. The analysis has revealed that Morales’ government kept up a close collaborative relationship with the movement. The government satisfied all the movement’s symbolic demands (oriented towards improving the social image of domestic workers), but only some of its substantive demands (those that had a direct impact on the domestic workers’ living and working conditions).
