Spain and Portugal are two countries that have faced similar exogenous economic shocks and political crises, yet have seen widely divergent political outcomes in the past decades, especially with regards to populist politics. While broader theories in populism cannot explain these divergences, I argue more broadly that the problem lies in a lack of interpretive insight: in other words, we are trying to study and explain identity politics without accounting for those identities. In this project, I exploit an intriguing comparative case to do precisely that: to grasp how the way peoplehood is constructed explains political outcomes ---and specifically what potential for transformation lies in populism as a response to contexts of crisis.
By improving our understanding of the political significance of collective identities from a bottom-up perspective, the aim is not only to unveil the micro-level determinants of phenomena such as populism, but also to illuminate shifting macro-structural trends of (post)modern politics.
The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation [ID 100010434]. The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/EU21/ 11890039.
Current studies have made immense progress in the comparative study of populism, yet breadth has come at the expense of depth. Beyond the idea that democratic dissatisfaction is widespread, we know little about the way ordinary people engage with the idea of the people, and whether this is consequential to their attitudes and behaviours. Building on innovative methods in other disciplines, I explore ways of applying Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to address this question in a way that balances comparative generalisation with attention to meaning and heterogeneity.
The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation [ID 100010434]. The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/EU21/ 11890039.
Academic discourse has historically fluctuated from celebrating to dismissing the transformative potential of contemporary political innovations (for instance, the alt-globalisation movement or populism). But often either position is driven by an excessive privileging of inductive perspectives or of deductive conceptual impositions, making it hard to feedback academic and social discourses productively. Specifically, I address this problem from two different angles:
· Studying the empirical prevalence of expectations/ideas of change, revolution, utopia, etc. among ordinary citizens, and the extent to which they might correspond to or contest theoretical understandings of the transformative potential of late-modern societies.
· Assessing the implications, potentials, and possible downsides of the correspondence between social and academic concepts/tools for emancipation (chiefly regarding gender).
The question of the researcher's "gaze" is a longstanding concern in social sciences. However, while we are mostly concerned with the broad power structures reproduced in academic theories, we have been less attentive to the effects of endogenous methodological dynamics. Approaching academia as a particular "economy of signs" (Baudrillard), I am interested in gauging how and why theories, methods and research praxis may become systemically misaligned, what this can reveal about the relation between ontology and epistemology in the academic field, and what implications this can have for the theories that we are able to imagine or enunciate.