Populism, Illiberalism, and Popular Sovereignty in Latin America

Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, 2024

This chapter discusses the record of left-wing populism in power in relation to the exercise of popular sovereignty. Many left- and right-wing populist leaders claim to want to enhance the “people’s power” and reduce the in􀂀uence of corrupt elites or politicians. Because populism has a strong illiberal orientation, these leaders seek to monopolize political representation and demonize those who refuse to support them. When unconstrained by existing liberal institutions, their illiberalism leads populist leaders to undermine the popular sovereignty they claim to not only defend but deepen. This manifests in unfair and rigged elections. Their illiberal anti-pluralism means that populist chief executives cannot accept the legitimacy of opposition, especially when it comes from civil society, because it threatens their contention that they are the sole embodiment of “the people.” Without liberal constraints, the illiberalism of populism weakens, not enhances, popular sovereignty. The chapter illustrates these points using evidence from Latin America.

Government and Opposition, 2018

While populist rule has become increasingly prevalent in the developing world, much of our knowledge about its implications remains anecdotal and contradictory. In this paper, we conduct the most comprehensive large-N cross-national test of the consequences of populist rule to date. Using data on 19 Latin American states, we find that populism's implications are mostly negative: (1) populist regimes tend to erode institutional and legal constraints on executive authority; (2) participation rates are not higher under populist governments or for populist campaigners; and (3) populist rule, even under left-wing populists, is not associated with more redistribution than non-populist democratic rule. We perform instrumental variable estimations and a quasi-experimental analysis to address the potential endogeneity of populism.

Ethics and International Affairs, 2009

Paraphrasing Karl Marx, a specter is haunting Latin America—the specter of ‘‘populism.’’ This label has been attached to a wave of radical left leaders in the region, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The term is normatively charged. The Mexican politician and scholar Jorge Castañeda contrasts radical populist leaders (such as Chávez and Morales), whom he characterizes as less convinced of the intrinsic value of democracy and human rights, with moderate left-wingers (such as Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay), who embrace representative democracy and respect human rights. This division of the Latin American left between ‘‘good’’ social democrats and ‘‘bad’’ populists is open to challenge.

Constellations, 2017

The most sensitive question in discussions about populism is whether populism is an assertion of democracy or a subversion of it. Populism is portrayed by its defenders as a radical version of democracy that seeks to deepen it by proclaiming the people's unified collective will against the special interests of the few (

This paper addresses the analytically and normatively ambiguous relation between democracy and populism. Populism, as a political phenomenon and in its relationship to democracy is currently a source of lively debate, particularly in the U.S. comparative politics literature on Latin American politics and in the literature on Western Europe. The key "intervening concept" necessary for analytically understanding populism and its relationship to democracy is the slippery but nonetheless indispensable notion of representation. More concretely, analyzing this relation requires an understanding of the many forms taken by popular representation in the mass politics of societies that are highly unequal or status-stratified.

Routledge, 2024

This chapter shows that populism puts liberal democratic institutions, like an independent judiciary, at risk. This is the case because independent courts are incompatible with populism’s resistance to constraints on the general will. This chapter argues that highly populist executives decrease judicial independence. However, this effect is conditioned by the legislative seat share of the chief executive’s party. When there is a high seat share of populists from the executive’s party in the legislature, a populist chief executive will have a stronger influence on policy outcomes. As a result, judicial independence is compromised, and a judiciary’s ability to act as a check on the legislature or executive is weakened. The relationship between populism and judicial independence is tested using an original dataset of legislative seat share of parties in 18 Latin American democracies from 1998 to 2017 and the Global Populism Database (GPD). A case study of Ecuador during the presidency of Rafael Correa is also presented.

Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2020

The article explores the effects of populist polarization in creating strong and long-lasting institutions based on the rule of law. It focuses on politics and not on the political economy of populism or of natural resource extraction. The first section briefly explains how we understand the contested notions of populism and the rule of law. The second focuses on the paradigmatic case of Juan Peron's first two administrations (1946-1956) to explore the ambiguous legacies of populist inclusion for the creation of long-lasting demo-cratic institutions. The third section focuses on how Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa appealed to the un-bounded will of the people to convene participatory constituent assemblies. The last section focuses on Ecuador's post-populist succession. Different from Evo Morales that was ousted by a coup, or Nicolas Maduro that killed democracy, Lenin Moreno, who was Correa's former vice-president, abandoned populism, ditched his mentor, and ...

pat r ic io n av i a a n d ig n ac io wa l k e r ; The end of the cold war coincided with the most widespread and successful wave of democratization that Latin America has experienced in its history. As the decade of the 1980s drew to an end, democracy was on the way to becoming "the only game in town." Yet, two decades after the auspicious transitions to democracy, the results of the democratic experience have been decidedly mixed. On the one hand, elections have been broadly recognized as the only legitimate mechanism to select authorities; on the other hand, in many countries and along many dimensions, the quality of democracy is less than satisfactory. Public levels of support for democracy are disturbingly low in some countries. In others, concerns about corruption, low levels of participation, and institutional designs not conducive to adequate accountability point to glaring deficiencies in the region's democracies. Two decades ago, the countries in the region prioritized making transitions to democracy possible. Today, the major challenge consists of ensuring democratic consolidation. Democracy has to be a self-sustaining system capable of producing concrete and positive results for its citizens. When its exercise strengthens institutions, democracy will be a virtuous cycle that produces concrete results and satisfies international standards. In that sense, democracy must be self-sustainable (Przeworski 2005). To take up the challenges faced by the countries of the region, we address two major themes in this chapter. First, we discuss the elements of democracy. We lay out formal criteria that must be present in order for a system to be democratic. We advocate a minimalist definition, and ch07_5330.indd 249 7/14/09

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2023

This article argues that populist governments, in comparison to non-populist ones, diminish the effectiveness of the rule of law in preventing state capture by economic elites. (Unconstrained) populism in power that reduces existing levels of the rule of law generates more state capture than (contained) populism which has no negative effects on the rule of law. The moderating effect we theorize is that the strength of the rule of law on state capture will show decreased effects at controlling state capture when a country is a populist relative to a nonpopulist. Populist leaders may seek to rid the old corruption networks, but once they aggrandise their power and weaken the rule of law, they have incentives to establish corrupt linkages with opportunistic economic elites willing to work with them, increasing state capture as a result. To test this theory, the paper employs a random effects model with 6 different specifications across 18 different Latin American countries, throughout the time period 1996-2017.

Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch: Volume 137, Issue 4, 2017

The recent surge in the number of populist governments coming into power raises the question of their effect on the prospects for democracy. This article uses the limited vs. open access framework – developed by North, Wallis, Webb and Weingast – to evaluate how populist leaders and their parties govern after coming to power. It looks at episodes of populists in power in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although most populist governments have kept civilian control of the military, notwithstanding some Latin American exceptions, they have typically moved their societies away from open access and sustainable democracy in several important ways: undermining rule of law in the name of the “will of the people” whom they claim to represent; reducing citizenship rights for unpopular minorities; making rules and their enforcement more personal and dependent on group identity; and hindering a free press and opposition parties that could hold the government accountable and perhap...