A wave of democratic decline has been on the rise around the world, raising important questions about how democratically elected incumbents concentrate power and undermine accountability. In The Authoritarian Divide: Populism, Propaganda, and Polarization, Orçun Selçuk offers a compelling new framework to understand these dynamics: affective leader polarization. This concept refers to how citizens and elites cluster at the extremes along a spectrum of emotional attachment, or rejection, to dominant chief executives. Through an innovative cross-regional comparison of the incumbencies of Ecuador under Rafael Correa, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, and Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Selçuk examines the emergence of affective leader polarization through distinct mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, its implications, and possible opposition strategies.
The book offers three contributions to the study of polarization and populism. First, it challenges the notion that polarization is structured primarily along a left-right ideological divide. Instead, Selçuk demonstrates that in contemporary politics, polarization increasingly revolves around individual leaders, regardless of their ideological orientation. In doing so, the book confronts prevailing narratives that cast Latin American left-wing populist leaders as inherently inclusionary. By examining the governments of Correa and Chávez, often described through the lens of inclusive populism, Selçuk shows how these leaders strategically excluded outgroups through symbolic, political, and material mechanisms. As such, this analysis suggests that populism, even in its left-wing variety, will always entail exclusion, and its divisive effects are not limited to the right.
Second, the book advances the literature on affective polarization by shifting the analytical focus from partisanship to the chief executive. Rather than examining how citizens develop emotional attachments towards members of their own party, Selçuk shows that affect toward individual leaders has become a primary axis of political division. This insight has important implications for party systems and democratic accountability. If politics are becoming increasingly personalized, the development of affective leader polarization can erode programmatic linkages, especially in contexts where party systems are weak or fragmented.
Third, the book contests the idea that polarization is a byproduct of pre-existing social and economic cleavages. Challenging research that treats the emergence of Chávez and Correa as inevitable consequences of economic inequality, Selçuk emphasizes the role of incumbent agency in actively cultivating polarization as an intentional political strategy. The book lays out how dominant chief executives often use a range of tools to draw boundaries between the in-group and the out-group, where members of the in-group are those who support the leader, and members of the out-group are those who do not. While these mechanisms can be political or material, the book pays particular attention to the symbolic dimensions of inclusion and exclusion. The book then emphasizes how even when leaders fail to deliver political and material benefits to their supporters, the construction of attachments to the leader through symbolic mechanisms can have long-lasting consequences.
Methodologically, the book presents a novel approach to systematically analyze how incumbents use mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Selçuk presents an original rubric to identify inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms across symbolic, political, and material dimensions. Importantly, the book examines symbolic inclusion and exclusion through the analysis of presidential speeches using Venezuela’s Aló Presidente, Ecuador’s Enlace Ciudadano, and Turkey’s Muhtar Meetings. Selçuk then examines the rise of affective leader polarization using survey data across the three cases. Importantly, the book finds that Chávez, Correa, and Erdoğan made extensive use of symbolic inclusion and exclusion, positioning themselves as humble outsiders and victims who represented the “true people.” However, an interesting finding is that Correa was less able to sustain these divisions through material and political means than Chávez and Erdoğan were. Even so, because polarization around Correa’s figure still permeates Ecuadorean politics long after his step down from power in 2017, this insight underscores how symbolic inclusion impacts politics even in the absence of material and political advantages.
Selçuk’s findings have significant implications for understanding the transformation, or collapse, of party systems and democracy. As affective leader polarization intensifies, parties are slowly forced to align themselves along pro-leader or anti-leader lines. This can incrementally undermine traditional ideological and programmatic partisan linkages. In these contexts, opposition parties are often compelled to form coalitions centered solely on rejection of the incumbent, even when they share little else in common. Meanwhile, the incumbent can continue to rely on their symbolic authority, rather than committing to a coherent ideological strategy. In many cases, Selçuk suggests, these dynamics may even come to resemble a de facto two-party system defined by affection, or disaffection, to the leader. Once leaders have cultivated support based on their personality, executive power grabs can then be easier to carry out.
The book also raises several avenues for future research. First, while Selçuk shows how affective leader polarization can be an effective strategy for power consolidation, it remains unclear how sustainable this approach is over time. Even in contexts of incumbent entrenchment, such as Venezuela, fatigue with affective leader polarization may eventually begin to arise, especially when the incumbent can no longer deliver material or political benefits. Future studies could examine when and why affective leader polarization loses its mobilizing appeal. Similarly, it is worth examining whether using this strategy can backfire. If an incumbent overestimates their level of support, they may miscalculate the extent to which they can cultivate an in-group, and any subsequent power grab can then be extremely costly for them.
Second, Selçuk carefully explains how affective leader polarization in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Turkey has led to the destabilization of party systems and democratic accountability. However, further research could examine whether polarization is inherently harmful for democracy, or if there are any instances under which it may merely be a feature of political contestation. Frantz et al. (Reference Frantz, Kendall-Taylor and Wright2024) explain that party personalism is detrimental because it enables leaders to attack horizontal accountability mechanisms, and that these effects are most pronounced when the ruling party controls the legislature. Similarly, the book suggests that affective leader polarization can harm democracy if paired with other attacks on accountability mechanisms. In this sense, work that clarifies what constitutes polarization as mere political contestation, and polarization as an authoritarian tendency, is thus worth developing. Clarifying these dynamics can better help assess the risks of affective leader polarization and guide actors on how to navigate polarized political landscapes.
Third, Selçuk emphasizes the importance of opposition strategies in the face of a hostile leader and compellingly argues that the opposition should avoid direct confrontations and instead pursue a strategy of mitigation, consistent with work by Gamboa (Reference Gamboa2022) that suggests opposition actors should aim to preserve democracy. Future research, however, should examine the structural constraints that opposition actors face. In contexts marked by repression, surveillance, and institutional marginalization, expecting opposition members to mitigate polarization may be unrealistic. Furthermore, some opposition actors may find polarization advantageous, using it to mobilize support, even if this may backfire. Additionally, as the case of Lenín Moreno in Ecuador suggests, ruling party actors may also come to view depolarization and mitigation as desirable, either due to their commitment to democracy or for other strategic reasons. Understanding when and why both opposition and ruling party actors may turn away from polarization is thus fertile ground for further study
The Authoritarian Divide presents a powerful and timely framework for understanding contemporary debates on polarization, populism, and democratic decline. Its conceptual clarity, empirical richness, and cross-regional comparison make it an important contribution for students of comparative politics in Latin America and beyond. Selçuk’s work not only deepens existing understanding of polarization and personalist rule but also opens new avenues for research about the durability of polarization, its consequences for democratic rule, and opposition behavior, all of which are increasingly important in an era of democratic erosion.
