Schooling party life – A frame analysis of Spanish left parties’ intra-party education

Educating the left – framing party education in Sweden and Spain

“…Bladh (2022) claims that party education fills different party functions within the political system and gives participants a political toolbox for different situations in political work. The five analysed parties provide courses, lectures, seminars or more specialised training for individuals with responsibilities within the parties (Arriaza Hult, 2020Hult, , 2022. How the parties structure their education depends on several factors, such as their size, their position in the democratic system, the party culture and the influence of individual members or fractions within the party.…”

“…The party's rapid journey from the streets to national, regional and local governments also entailed the challenge of finding people to represent the party and to train them in certain skills. To confront some of these problems and to set common norms and frameworks, they offer a digital course for public officers on their website to make the courses easy to access (Arriaza Hult, 2022). The United Left which goes to election together with Podemos could perhaps be assumed to have similar courses for public officers; their party representative, however, expresses self-criticism about the party's political education.…”

“…As the countries have five left parties in their national parliaments: the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), the Swedish Left Party (V), the Spanish Social Democratic Party (PSOE), the Spanish United Left (IU) and Spanish Podemos (P), while also having rather different conditions for party organisation, studying narratives about education offers a unique opportunity to analyse how different parties with roots in the labour movement work with education. These five chosen parties organise educational activities that target sympathisers, new members, practiced members and public officials and provide courses with contents ranging from theory and municipality knowledge to public speaking and communication skills (Arriaza Hult, 2020, 2022; Bladh, 2022; Nordvall & Pastuhov, 2020). Seeing that the topic of party education has passed by surprisingly unexplored, an initial step in mapping the organisation of internal educational structures is to interview individuals that hold responsibility for education in the parties.…”