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Democratizing Spanish institutional politics? Feminist strategies to counter anti-gender opposition at the local level

Democracy
Gender
Feminism
Activism
Paloma Caravantes
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Emanuela Lombardo
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Paloma Caravantes
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Emanuela Lombardo
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Abstract

Radical right populist parties and anti-gender movements are increasingly opposing gender equality policies and structures within and outside political institutions in Europe. This oppositional climate not only threatens gender equality but also the quality of European democracies (Lombardo, Kantola and Rubio 2021; Graff and Korolczuk 2021; Verloo and Paternotte 2018), thus, calling for a higher scholarly attention on understanding feminist strategies to counteract this opposition. Local institutions are particularly relevant to study democratizing and feminist agendas due to their proximity to the citizenry (Roth et al. 2019, Caravantes 2021). Yet, little attention has been given to their role in the current anti-gender political climate. What are the feminist institutional strategies to counteract anti-gender and de-democratizing opposition at the local level? How democratic are these feminist responses? What are the distinctive features of the local level in these feminist institutional strategies? This paper will address feminist strategies of Barcelona local government, an interesting laboratory of feminist municipal politics (Cruells and Alfama 2019) in decentralized Spain, which is a particularly favorable system to develop feminist counterstrategies due to the country’s competitive federalism and multilevel diversity of gender regimes (Lombardo and Alonso 2020). Through the analysis ofmunicipal plans and interviews with key feminist actors, we examine pioneering feminist discourses and practices of Barcelona City Council during 2015-2021. We argue that feminist institutional counterstrategies at the local level can contribute to democratize institutional politics to the extent that they propose inclusive-intersectional and agonistic democratic discourses and practices (Kantola and Lombardo 2021).