Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century is a rich compendium of essays by leading scholars from Latin America, the United States and the United Kingdom, who bring the literature up to date by focusing on the new and more radical forms of populism in the region during the current era, and by situating these experiences within historical and comparative perspectives. Contemporary radical populism is compared with classical populism of the 1930s and 1940s, and neoliberal populism in the 1990s. A strong introductory chapter by the editors frames the volume by asking why populism has re-emerged and how it is different from earlier periods. While acknowledging the ongoing debates over the meaning and definition of populism, as well as its ambiguous implications for democracy, the editors stress that contemporary radical populism is electoral, claims democratic legitimacy, seeks republican refounding, encourages state intervention and sees itself as part of an international movement.
The introduction is followed by four chapters on various analytical and comparative problems. Kenneth Roberts’ ‘Parties and Populism in Latin America’ is a tour de force that offers the reader a coherent overall framework in which populism can be analysed in terms of critical junctures, ‘crossnational shifts in the logic of capitalist development that realign states, markets, and social actors’. To understand contemporary populism in all its complexity, the concept of neoliberal critical junctures and their impact on party systems is an indispensable tool of analysis. Enrique Peruzzotti tackles the complicated relationship between populism and representative democracy with an interesting twist. After a nuanced discussion of alternative concepts of populism and their relation to representation, he asks whether contemporary delegative democracies are populist. He finds fewer opportunities to ‘activate’ excluded masses and a stronger emphasis on rights, especially in those countries that experienced the ‘trauma of state terrorism’ (p. 80).
Francisco Panizza's chapter on the meaning of populism is remarkable for a number of reasons. The term has many and different resonances among different audiences and contexts, and Panizza does an outstanding job of capturing these diverse meanings and exploring their subtle ambiguities and often hidden normative agendas. He makes a persuasive case for thinking about populism not as a characteristic of a regime or leader but as a kind of intervention, a political strategy to establish relations of identification with an audience. The final general piece, by Kurt Weyland, examines populism and social policy. Weyland notes that building social democracy takes time and depends on preconditions that are difficult to establish, and then asks whether populism is a better alternative strategy for achieving social welfare objectives. The answer is negative: social policies under Chávez and Fujimori are found wanting when compared with similar programmes under Cardoso and the Chilean Concertación.
The remaining chapters examine various cases of populism, new and old, throughout the region. The first set consists of ambiguous cases. Hector Schamis’ chapter can be read not only for its insightful history of populism throughout twentieth-century Argentina but also for the very claim that the concept of populism has been subject to conceptual stretching and should not be applied to the Kirchners. Leslie Bethell is also hesitant to label Lula a populist: Brazil has been ‘more resistant to the neopopulism of the left than many other Latin American countries’ (p. 198). Another case in which the label ‘populist’ generates reservations is Peru. It is not that populism cannot thrive in Peru; on the contrary, as Cynthia McClintock shows, populism in all its variants – classical, military, heterodox, neoliberal – has occurred throughout the twentieth century. Today, however, what McClintock calls the ‘vicious cycle’ whereby liberal democracy is undermined by populists, thus creating conditions for democratic weakness that invite further populist challenges, ‘may finally have been broken’ (despite the election of an erstwhile radical populist, Ollanta Humala, in 2011). Ana María Bejarano's chapter on Colombia's Uribe is the last substantive chapter in the book but I would include it with this set because it offers an example of how an ambitious leader, in this instance a right-winger who used populist tactics, was restrained by the resilience of democratic institutions – the courts, the legislature, the press and civil society.
The next three chapters address exemplary cases of radical populism in the Andes: Venezuela under Chávez, Bolivia under Morales, and Correa's Ecuador. These are outstanding chapters by highly knowledgeable authors, and they provide an opportunity to examine one of the major concerns of the book: ‘What are the authoritarian traits of these regimes?’ (p. 362). Is radical populism undermining democracy? Given the centrality of this question, it is perhaps remarkable that none of the authors explicitly makes the case for classifying the cases under study as authoritarian regimes tout court, though the Venezuelan regime is described as having authoritarian ‘tendencies’ (pp. 265–6).
Authors of individual chapters raise troubling questions about the ‘weakening and destruction of Venezuela's liberal democratic institutional design’ (López Maya and Panzarelli, p. 268); the lack of ‘institutional checks and balances’ (Crabtree, p. 290) and the centralised decision-making in Bolivia under Evo Morales; and the plebiscitary tendency of Ecuador's Correa, who aims to ‘do away with the two pillars of the liberal state: the division of powers into three branches, and democratic representation’ (Montúfar, p. 314). At the same time, they recognise that these regimes have sought to experiment with a ‘different model of democracy’ (López Maya and Panzarelli, p. 267), are seeking to fulfil long-postponed promises of ‘citizenship’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ (Crabtree, p. 292) or are seeking a ‘new model of legitimacy’ based on constitutional refounding (Montúfar, p. 314). Moreover, there are significant differences among the cases, with Venezuela and Ecuador experimenting with a much more top-down version of populism based on polarisation and permanent campaigning (pp. 251, 306), while Bolivia's MAS is far more a creature of social movements, meaning that it has an internal ‘culture of delegation and accountability’ (Crabtree, p. 284) which aligns with and reinforces social pressures for direct democracy.
In light of the difficulty of assessing the state of democracy under radical populism, Arnson and De la Torre, likewise, use terms like ‘democratic erosion’ (p. 364), ‘growing authoritarianism’ (p. 363) and ‘de-democratization’ (p. 367). They eschew unambiguously classifying any of their cases as non-democracies: ‘Today's populist regimes’, they claim, ‘are focused on transformational or revolutionary projects that concentrate power in the executive and do not envision ceding power to political opponents … The institutions and legal frameworks that constrain the unfettered exercise of power have been systematically eroded’ (pp. 363–4). The italics are mine, because the qualifier is crucial: the radical populists analysed in this volume have not yet, in fact, refused to cede power after losing an election, or have fraudulently stolen or cancelled elections. Rather than ruptures, we may be observing, in at least the case of Venezuela, what Guillermo O'Donnell called, in a 1998 World Policy Journal article, the ‘slow death’ of democracy. And as O'Donnell noted, what remains when democracy has become a facade is typically some form of military-based power. That would mean the end not just of liberal representative democracy, but of any meaningful form of democratic experimentation – including populist visions of democracy.
If Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century is not the last word on the subject, that is due to the open-ended and ongoing nature of current transformations in the region. The collection is an excellent guide to these transformations, and will be an invaluable benchmark against which to measure future trends.
