Keywords
anti-austerity movement
contentious politics
populism
political manifesto
How to Cite
Abstract
This article aims to identify the major cores of the 15-M Movement mindset and explain how particular historical factors shaped it. The research problems are to identify the types of relations the movement established between the people and the ruling elites in its political manifestos, and the sources of these discursively created relations. The research field encompasses the content of political manifestos published between the Spanish general election on March 9, 2008 and immediately after the demonstrations held on May 15, 2011. To solve these problems, the research applies source analysis of the political manifestos. These are: (1) The Manifesto of ¡Democracia Real YA!; (2) The Manifesto of the Puerta del Sol Camp, and (3) The Manifesto “May 68 in Spain.” The research uses the technique of relational qualitative content analysis to determine the relations between the semantic fields of the major categories of populism, ‘the people’ and ‘the elites,’ as well as to identify the meanings formed by their co-occurrence. The tool used is a content analysis instruction whose major assumption is to identify all the attempts to create images of ‘the people,’ ‘the elites,’ and relations between them.
Funding
This research paper is a result of the research project The Culture of Political Violence Dynamics of Anti-austerity Movements in Europe. It was financially supported by the National Science Centre
Poland [grant number 2016/23/D/HS5/00192].
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