In this important book, Kurt Weyland addresses a timely question: how much of a threat does populism pose to democracy? He approaches the question with a comprehensive analysis of cases around the world where populists have won chief executive office since the 1980s. Weyland’s approach advances beyond recent scholarship that focuses on high-profile cases of populists dismantling democracy. He rightly criticises such approaches for selecting on the dependent variable and for falling victim to the ‘availability heuristic’ (p. 259). Memory tends to foreground alarming cases of populists who crush democracy and overlooks the many would-be populist authoritarians who failed.
In a systematic study of 40 cases across Europe and the Americas, Weyland identifies the combinations of factors that enable populist chief executives to dismantle democracy. Populist chief executives asphyxiated democracy in just seven of the cases (Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán). Naturally, these seven cases loom large as cautionary examples. But in most cases, democracies survive populist rule. The many cases where populist chief executives fail to perpetuate themselves in power and crush democracy (e.g. Argentina’s Carlos Menem, Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Slovakia’s Vladimír Mečiar) have received less attention from scholars, but they are essential to any proper assessment of the threat populism poses.
By tallying up the record of successful and failed populist leaders, Weyland offers a striking portrait of populism’s ‘haphazard agency’ (p. 11). Populist leaders are ‘headstrong and overbearing, transgressive and confrontational’ (p. 11). They raise controversial issues and employ unconventional tactics. In the process, they make many enemies, especially among the political establishment. Not surprisingly, populism emerges as a high-risk political strategy that occasionally succeeds but more often fails.
Weyland’s analysis shows that populists succeed only when a country’s institutional weakness coincides with special ‘conjunctural opportunities’ (p. 6). These opportunities arise when leaders confront severe, broadly perceived, but resolvable crises (e.g. hyperinflation, security threats) or when they preside over large-scale revenue surges (especially hydrocarbon windfalls). Such opportunities endanger democracy by driving huge surges of popular support that leaders leverage to transform institutions and insulate themselves from future political challenge.
Weyland identifies two primary forms of institutional weakness that render democracies vulnerable to populist transformation. In Latin America and much of the developing world, formal institutions may be weak in the sense that they fail to command compliance and are subject to para-legal alteration, such as by convening a constituent assembly. Especially vulnerable are unstable countries that have suffered a series of irregular removals of chief executives. In Europe, institutions may instead be subject to easy change, especially in majoritarian parliamentary systems lacking veto players, where a prime minister in command of majority legislative support can weaken democratic accountability via constitutional amendment and ‘the overhaul of infraconstitutional rules, including electoral laws’ (p. 40).
To elaborate these broad generalisations, Weyland details an astonishing array of cases. Here his deep mastery of the material shines through. His case descriptions richly illustrate and substantiate the argument, as well as detail how his theory performs for right-wing and left-wing populists in Latin America and across different types of European political systems. The conclusion also offers brief treatments of some important cases in Asia. The huge range of clearly and concisely presented cases – all drawing on relevant prior scholarship – is downright magisterial.
Weyland’s analysis advances beyond conventional scholarly wisdom in several key respects. First, contrary to Juan Linz’s famous ‘perils of presidentialism’ thesis, Weyland finds that parliamentary systems, with their lack of checks and balances, offer weaker safeguards against authoritarian involution than presidential systems. Even presidential systems of ‘middling institutional strength’ (p. 7), as in many Latin American countries, raise roadblocks to aspiring authoritarians. Meanwhile, the absence of checks and balances can permit a parliamentary chief executive (particularly in majoritarian electoral systems) to employ legal means of consolidating power and stacking the deck against future accountability, as exemplified by Orbán and Erdoğan. In this sense, Weyland aligns with James Madison on questions of democratic design, emphasising institutional rules – such as firm barriers against easy constitutional change and term limits on chief executives – to guard against concentrations of power.
A second counterintuitive finding is that party polarisation offers protection against authoritarianism, contrary to conventional wisdom that polarisation is a risk factor for democratic backsliding. By ensuring a firm bloc of opposition to populist leaders, polarisation puts up a ‘dike against a potential upsurge of support’ (p. 211) capable of endowing a would-be authoritarian with the kind of political clout necessary to impose major institutional change.
Third, Weyland’s analysis offers new insight into the resilience of advanced democracies against populist assault. Although ‘no kind of institutional design can reliably foreclose undemocratic machinations’ (p. 48), advanced democracies enjoy important protections against populist authoritarianism. Their more diversified economies are less subject to the booms and busts that drive huge surges of support for populist leaders. Such democracies are also more insulated against security crises that can give rise to perceived ‘saviors of the people’ (p. 31).
Overall, Weyland’s analysis is a model of social science inquiry, exhibiting objectivity, falsifiable claims and careful assessments of evidence. He confronts without apology or special pleading the equivalent risks to democracy from both left-wing and right-wing variants of populism. These strengths are very much on display in Chapter 6’s analysis of Donald Trump’s first term as president. Scholars have struggled to approach this topic dispassionately. Weyland’s analysis of the US experience under Trump leverages comparisons with the broader phenomenon of populist leadership around the world. Approaching the subject from a global perspective, Weyland takes stock of how the United States differs from countries where populists have achieved hegemony: stronger checks and balances, a constitution extremely difficult to change, a vibrant, litigious civil society and a large, diverse economy insulated from either large-scale bonanzas or crashes. He concludes that the United States remains resilient to authoritarianism, even though populist leadership corrodes democratic institutions in the United States as elsewhere. The analysis also makes the valuable point that populist episodes can spark counterreactions that may rejuvenate democracy.
Weyland’s study is simply required reading for students of democracy. Accessible and lively, the book is suitable for adoption in a range of courses. It offers a counterpoint to other work on these topics, one that will spark scholarly debate and fuel classroom discussion. Most of all, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat advances our understanding of a difficult, hugely important question and offers a sober but largely favourable assessment of the prospects for democracies in their ongoing confrontations with populism.
