Feminist Agency and Institutional Change within Political Parties: The Case of Uruguay’s Left-Wing Frente Amplio

This article examines how feminist actors achieve institutional change within political parties, analyzing Uruguay’s left-wing Frente Amplio, which adopted a series of internal gender-equality reforms between 2016 and 2025. Drawing on feminist institutionalism and a relational conception of agency, it proposes an analytical framework built around three interacting factors – sustained feminist agency exercised by critical actors, reflexive strategic action encompassing institutional and discursive strategies, and the presence of critical allies – mediated by favorable political opportunity structures. Based on qualitative analysis of party documents and in-depth interviews, it shows that feminist institutional change is neither linear nor consensus-driven, but cumulative and iterative.