From the Streets to the Party Lists: Activist Past and Electoral Chances of Political Candidates

Does activist experience translate into political capital? This paper examines the relationship between contentious and electoral politics in times of crisis by investigating whether voters reward prior involvement in social movements in party primaries of a movement-party and in the general election. Focusing on the case of Podemos, a new Spanish party with roots in the indignados movement, it uses an original dataset of candidate profiles to analyze the effect of a social movements background on the candidate's probability of being placed on the party list and their performance in the general election.