What has become of Podemos? The elites of a radical left party and their evolving dynamics of recruitment.

In recent years, a growing body of literature has analyzed radical left parties in Europe. However, internal party life and the sociology of party elites have remained an understudied topic, mostly dominated by non-systematic accounts on party leaders. This article offers an empirical exploration of the sociology of Podemos party cadres, based on a prosopography of the elected members of the Consejo Ciudadano Estatal and the Consejo de Coordinación, its main internal institutions, since 2014. This research questions Podemos' status of "outsider" in the partisan landscape by quantifying three fundamental dimensions of its cadres' public image: their links with social movements, academia and Latin America. By measuring the social and biographical characteristics of Podemos' elites as they institutionalize, this article offers a new scientific lens to analyze the trajectory of radical left parties, and provides a method to test common hypotheses on contemporary political forces after the Great Recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]