Abstract: The paper addresses the recent emergence of two phenomena on the political agenda of many OECD countries: political parties born out of Social Movements and the Universal Basic Income (UBI). Regarding the former, one of the most important novelties in the Spanish political context has been the emergence of PODEMOS. Coming from nowhere, just four months after its foundation the party became the third political force in 23 of the 40 main cities in the European elections 2014. With regards to the latter, one of the social policy proposals most discussed recently in Spain, especially after PODEMOS included it in the program for the European elections, has been the UBI. The paper explores the future of this proposal on the economic agenda of PODEMOS in the light of the preferences of its constituency. To do so the paper uses an online survey on the UBI conducted during November 10 and December 15 2014 by the “Circle” of PODEMOS on the UBI proposal. We propose and test two hypotheses in the article: (1) being left-wing is going to play a decreasingly important role in the vote for PODEMOS; (2) as a result of this, PODEMOS won’t include the UBI proposal in the party’s economic program for the general elections in November-December 2015.
Borja Barragué, César Martínez Sánchez, “The Basic Income on the agenda of PODEMOS: A matter of political or financial viability?“, Academia.edu, 29 July 2015
