The articulations between populism and gender are receiving growing attention from scholars both in Europe and North and Latin America (e.g. Köttig, Bitzan and Pető 2017; Norocel 2013; 2015), but the theoretical framework of populism has not been applied to the analysis of gender framing yet, which this paper intends to do by addressing the following research question: How does the populist character of parties influence their framing of gender policies?
The paper is focused on the case of the Bolivian government between 2006 and 2017, a period in which president Evo Morales and his populist, anti-neoliberal and indigenist party Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) ruled Bolivia and promoted important gender-related laws, such as the 4021/2009 Law that introduced parity in parliamentary elections, the 243/2012 Law against Violence and Political Harassment on Women, and the 348/2013 Law to Guarantee Women a Life Free of Violence. In this paper, I argue that the MAS government framed its gender policies through the discursive opposition between 'the people' and 'the elite', which implied applying its specific definitions of 'people' and 'elite' to the actors that intervened in the policy-making processes of gender policies: international organisations such as UN Women and feminist NGOs were defined as part of 'the elite' (they were presented by the Bolivian government as nearly-imperialistic and colonialist organisations that threaten the autonomy of the Bolivian people), while organisations of peasant and indigenous women were considered as the incarnation of 'the people' in the field of gender policies (they were presented by the government as representatives of the indigenous majority who is supposed to rule the country since MAS and Morales' arrival to state power).
The article proceeds in three parts. First of all, MAS' political discourse is explored through the lenses of the literature on populism (e.g. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2015; Stanley, 2008) in order to identify its definitions of 'the people' and 'the elite'. Second, a sample of documents produced by the government and MAS is analysed in the light of the features of the populist discourse of Morales' government, with the aim of exploring how its definitions of 'the people' and 'the elite' influence the government's framing of gender policies. Finally, the findings are put into relation with existing literature on the connections between populism and gender, with the aim of contributing to ongoing discussions on the topic. The analysis is interesting from two viewpoints: gender framing, and elaboration and implementation of gender policies, insofar as the different normative perspectives on different kinds of actors may have influenced their respective power in the processes of elaboration of gender policies.
The paper follows a qualitative methodology based on Braun and Clarke's method of thematic content analysis (2006). Two kinds of documents produced by the Bolivian government are analysed: documents focused on gender policy (press releases, reports to international organisations, gender policy plans) and documents that set the general policy priorities and the major features of the discourse of the government (electoral programs, development plans, Morales' speeches).
