What impact do left-wing ‘populists’ have? The case of Unidas Podemos as a junior coalition partner in Spain

Research on the government participation of radical and ‘niche’ parties tends to focus more on the conditions under which they join governments, and on the electoral consequences of such decisions, rather than on their policy impact while in government. When it does focus on the latter, it tends to privilege the study of right-wing populist actors or green parties. Thus, we still know relatively little about the concrete policy achievements of radical left parties that are deemed to be 'populist'. Though the general wisdom is that they have little choice but to abandon their radicalism (Syriza in Greece being a case in point), it is easy to underestimate their impact when putting it against their own idealistic aspirations of social change. The recent government experience of Unidas Podemos as a junior coalition partner in Spain (2020-2023) constitutes therefore a valuable case-study in the effort to address this gap. This manuscript asks to what extent Podemos and its allies managed to impact the government’s program – and, if so, on which areas – and whether their proposals translated into actual policy output. Methodologically, the paper’s empirical strategy relies first and foremost on a detailed content analysis of the individual policy pledges present in the coalition agreement (post-election) and their comparison with the individual parties’ manifestos (pre-election), so as to determine, for each policy pledge, from which party they came from. After singling out the policy areas in which Podemos most influenced the coalition’s agenda, the paper scrutinizes whether concrete policy steps were taken to meet the pledges coming from Podemos. Though recognizing that the party has benefited from a macroeconomic conjuncture favorable to social spending, the paper demonstrates that the party had a concrete policy impact in areas as diverse as housing policy, tax policy, and labor policy. Transversal to all those areas is the desire expand the rights of those at the bottom (e.g., the evicted, the poor, the workers, etc.) and limit the power of those at the top (i.e., property owners, wealthy taxpayers, employers, etc.). The paper ends with a discussion on whether Podemos policy priorities are simply an outcome of its radical left ideology or reflect a populist mindset too.