Populism, Insurrections, Democratization
Carlos de la Torre
The illness, death, and subsequent manufacturing of Hugo Chávez into a saintlike figure in Venezuela; the coming to power in 2011 of former police constable Michael Sata in Zambia, which ended two decades of rule by the Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD); and the electoral successes of right-wing populist movements in Europe all attest to the vitality of populism on a global scale. Populist movements and parties are in power in several African and Latin American nations such as Senegal, Zambia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. They are also contesting the rule of traditional parties in Western nations from Australia to France. Rebellions and insurrections carried out in the name of the people have taken place in nations as diverse as Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, and Spain. These insurrections attest to the vitality of the cry “power to the people” and to the democratizing demand to return “power” to its original owners: “the people.”
But to invoke the name of “the people” is to raise the possibility of a theological conception of politics. When the term “the people” is used to describe those who are to be liberated, alleged enemies of the people—such as “illegal aliens” or the “evil oligarchy”—are constructed as external “Others” who represent a threat to the purity of the homogeneous body of the people. Claiming to incarnate “the people,” populist leaders might be tempted to stay in power indefinitely. Alternatively, insurgents could use the name of the people to challenge the appropriation of politics by elites, to question injustices, and to demand a better world. Recent insurrections from the Arab Spring to the different Occupy movements from Madrid to New York attest to the democratizing dreams of those who invoke the “power of the people” in order to say “enough” to injustices and oppressions.
Contemporary academics respond differently to populism. Some argue that populism could lead to authoritarian outcomes.1 Others continue to see in populism a promise for the democratic regeneration of ostracized and exclusionary political systems.2 Instead of praising or condemning populism, this volume systematically analyzes the challenges that populism poses to mainstream understandings of liberal democracy. The essays collected here explore theoretically and empirically the democratizing promises and the authoritarian threats of populism. Our contributors analyze the role of discourses, political-theological symbols, and political institutions to explore how populism is related to democratization. Populism simultaneously attempts to fulfill democratic promises while working against the pluralisms and freedoms that make a democracy possible.
The last decades have witnessed a renaissance of studies on populism. Most work continues to focus on particular geographical areas, mainly Europe or Latin America, or to compare populism in Europe and the Americas.3 This volume broadens the comparative study of populism to Africa, Australia, Thailand, the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Our contributors analyze, theoretically and empirically, why populism emerges, its main characteristics, and how it relates to democratization. The essays in this volume illustrate the advantages of using political definitions of populism as a strategy to achieve political power and to govern, or as a discourse that represents politics as a Manichaean struggle between the mythical “people” and the evil elites. Instead of using one definition to compare populism globally, the essay authors use different approaches and definitions to analyze the ambiguities of populism for democratization in different geographical areas.
This volume analyzes the centrality of the concept of the people to understand insurgencies, rebellions, and populist movements and parties. Across the globe, insurgents and politicians continue to use the phrase “power to the people” as a leitmotif in rhetoric that targets the elites. These words suggest that corrupt politicians, the servants of imperial powers, or the oligarchy have appropriated power from its legitimate owners. The term exerts an emotional appeal that has the potential to unite all the people of a nation against a perceived external threat. It can also be used to create solidarity within a nation among those excluded and marginalized by the power of cultural, economic, and political elites. The phrase “power to the people” carries echoes of previous struggles for emancipation. Only those who have illegitimately appropriated the power of the people, or those who benefit from the people’s exclusion, can oppose the restoration of power to its rightful owners.
The political theorist Sofia Näsström reminds us that the people is “one of the more used and abused concepts in the history of politics.”4 Perhaps its vagueness, the fact that it can be given alternative and even contradictory meanings, explains why it can be used so efficiently as a mobilizing tool. The term the people is central to descriptions of democracy, nationalism, and populism. Yet it is difficult to identify who the people are. Contrary to the assertions of politicians, activists, and some folklorists, the people is not a definable entity whose essence can be discovered or whose interests can be represented.5 The people is a discursive construct, and a claim made in struggles between politicians, activists, and intellectuals.
Like Janus, the people has two faces: “It menaces the political order at the same time that grounds it.”6 The concept of the people is still used, as in earlier times, to refer to the threat of dangerous mobs that could be mobilized by demagogues. Hegel argued that “talking about the people as the ultimate source of institutions and procedures merely gives political charlatans and nationalist demagogues an empty phrase with which to conjure up terrible mischief.”7 Other scholars and activists challenge these images of the dangerous masses by constructing the people as inherently virtuous. They imagine the people as a “mythic being that is not only the source of political legitimacy, but can sometimes appear to redeem politics from oppression, corruption, and banality.”8
Given the vagueness of the term, it is not a surprise that Frederick Engels “reacted brusquely to a reference to ‘the people in general’ in the 1891 Erfurt Programme, asking ‘what is that?’ ”9 Can “the people” speak, and if so, how does it talk? Does it speak by voicing individual preferences that can be counted in public opinion polls, and as individual votes? Can the people speak with one voice when they rebel to demand their recognition? Who speaks for the people? This introduction uses the rich theoretical and empirical contributions of our collaborators to illustrate the ambiguous meanings of the concepts of “the people” and populism. It illustrates how these concepts oscillate between poles: whole and part, active and passive, threat and promise. It analyzes debates about who the people are, who speaks on their behalf, and their relationship with democratic ideals. The first section analyzes how the external and internal boundaries of the people are constructed. It explains how the concept of populism inherited views of the people as a danger to democracy. The second section focuses on attempts to give recognition to those who are considered to have no voice, “those who have no part,” “who do not count,” “who have no entitlement to exercise their power.”10 The third section studies the different images of the two bodies of the people. The fourth section analyzes the conceptions of democracy that ground constructions of the people as individual actors in everyday politics, and as the eschatological savior of democracy. The fifth section explores different attempts to speak for the people, and to represent or embody its will and interests. The last section details the structure of this volume.
The Boundaries of the People
A “people” is defined in contrast to other “peoples.” Bernard Yack remarks that British patriots defined themselves in opposition to those “garlic-eating” Catholics across the Channel.11 Narratives of peoplehood, Rogers Smith writes, combine economic stories, political power stories, and constitutive narratives.12 The latter focus on the race, ethnicity, religion, history, and culture of a group, or that which constitutes its identity. These narratives that integrate appeals to reason and emotion form the foundation of projects of people building.
Narratives of peoplehood not only define an “US” in opposition to external boundaries; they also include and exclude those who are the rightful and moral members of national communities. The people need to be constantly redefined and purified. Members are included and excluded according to criteria such as culture, “language, blood, and territory.”13 Rogers Smith shows how the United States was imagined as a white nation that included all European immigrants, excluding those racialized as nonwhite Others. The legacies of white-supremacist images of America continue to inform, as George Michael shows in chapter 9, the self-understanding of the extreme Right. The unwillingness to accept an African American as president encouraged sectors of the Right to organize into what became the Tea Party. Even though, as Michael writes, the Tea Party is not necessarily a racist or extremist movement, it has an implicit white racial consciousness. Its members and the people who support it are overwhelmingly white.
Ethnicity and race define the boundaries of who belongs to a particular people. For example, Gypsies, Jews, and, nowadays, Muslims are viewed as external to most European nations. José Pedro Zúquete shows in chapter 8 how European right-wing populists espouse nativist views that construct Muslim immigrants as a “threat in regard to religious freedom, gender equality, and free speech.” The British National Party (BNP), for example, talks about the “Islamic colonization of Britain.” Like the Front National in France, the BNP uses exclusionary racialized rhetoric to depict Muslim immigrants as inherent outsiders to Western inclusionary values. Likewise, Australia’s populist leader Pauline Hanson burst into politics in 1996 with a speech against immigration. As Benjamin Moffitt explains in chapter 10, her rhetoric is very similar to that of the European populist Right.
Narratives of mestizaje—understood as cultural and ethnic mixing—were used in Latin America to exclude indigenous people while simultaneously inviting them to belong to the nation on the condition that they abandoned their cultural specificity. Indigenous movements in Latin America rejected the politics of mestizaje, demanding their socioeconomic and cultural inclusion and recognition. Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, is carrying out what his administration describes as a decolonizing revolution. Yet, as Nancy Postero argues in chapter 14, what the regime means by decolonization, who constitutes the plural people of Bolivia, and who speaks for the people all remain ambiguous.
Elites sometimes link the people to the mob. The images of “the mass” inherited from crowd psychology and mass society theories continue to inform popular and academic descriptions of the “dangerous rabble.” The mob is feared because it is seen as irrational and as a danger to civil society. It brings to mind the specters of disorganization and anomie. So ingrained is the fear of the mob that one of the common meanings of the term “pueblo” in Spanish or “peuple” in French refers to the wretched, the oppressed, the unruled, and the uncivilized.
In Latin America, elites view the unruly and mostly nonwhite pueblo as the mob. They use paternalistic arguments to assume the duty of transforming the unruly mob (el pueblo) into civilized and educated citizens of their nation. When the poor, the nonwhite, and the marginalized in general accept the paternalistic arguments of their country’s elites, then their fears dissipate. The marginalized are protected and treated with maternal and paternal love. However, when these marginalized people refuse to accept the paternalistic narrative put forth by the elites and instead take to the street to rebel or riot, they are stigmatized as a threat and an irrational force that needs to be contained by any means necessary.
In Venezuela, for example, after the introduction of structural adjustment policies under Carlos Andrés Pérez’s second administration (1989–1993), populist followers were transformed into “barbaric masses.” The hike in the price of domestic gasoline in 1989, Fernando Coronil argues, broke the bond between the paternalistic state and the people based on the shared assumption that oil rights were the birthright of all Venezuelans. Large demonstrations turned into two days of “massive rioting and looting, escalating from neighborhood groceries stores to commercial centers in Caracas and other cities.”14 After these events, poor people were characterized as “an unruly and parasitical mass to be disciplined by the state and made productive by the market.”15 This rebellion, called the Caracazo, evoked elite nightmares of the savage, uncivilized, disorganized rabble invading the centers of civility. These constructions of the rabble as the antithesis of reason and civilized behavior allowed or justified brutal state repression that resulted in at least four hundred deaths.
Elites depict the excluded as incapable of rational speech. “If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being,” Jacques Rancière writes, “you begin by not seeing him as the bearer of signs of politicity, by not understanding what he says, by not hearing what issues from his mouth as discourse.”16 Exclusions are based on symbolic configurations of ways of speaking, seeing, and acting. Rancière writes, “the Roman patrician power refused to accept that the sounds uttered from the mouths of the plebeians were speech.”17 Unlike rational citizens, who deliberate in the public sphere and participate in the institutions of liberal democracy, the mob is considered by elites to act irrationally. Elites argue that they riot to destroy, loot, and kill. Contrary to citizens who reason their political preferences and vote on behalf of political platforms, the mob supposedly follows their emotions. Plebiscitary democracy based on the manipulation of emotions by demagogues is the antagonist, it is argued, to a democracy based on reason.
This notion of the people as irrational mob was very influential in the development of the concept of populism in Latin America and Europe. Gino Germani, an Italian-born sociologist who migrated to Argentina to escape imprisonment under Mussolini, and who witnessed the birth of Juan Perón’s populist movement in the 1940s, interpreted it as an example of working-class totalitarianism. For Germani, populism was a phase in Latin America’s history linked to the transition from a traditional to a modern society. He argued that rapid and abrupt structural change caused by urbanization and industrialization created masses in a state of anomie. Germani portrays Perón as a charismatic leader who appealed to the emotions of these irrational masses to get into power and to govern. Peronism, Germani concluded, “gave workers an experience of political and social participation in their personal lives, annulling at the same time political organizations and the basic rights that are the pillars for any genuine democracy.”18
Since Germani’s seminal work, Latin American scholars have debated whether populism is indeed a phase in the history of the region, as he suggested, whether it is irrational, and whether it is a threat or a corrective for liberal democracy.19 Many European scholars linked populism to the “pathological” experience of fascism. European populists are responding, it is argued, to the crisis provoked by modernization, the crisis of ideological parties, and the transformation of rational politics into emotional and irrational bonds between charismatic leaders and their followers.20
As the contributors to this book illustrate, conceptions of populism have moved far beyond simplistic explanations that pointed toward supposed “mass pathologies,” or toward the ability of charismatic leaders to manipulate the uninformed and gullible populace. Scholars use concepts and theories of mainstream social sciences to analyze populism as a discourse and/or as a political strategy. Populism is based on a discourse that pits the people and the elites as antagonistic poles. It is based on a moral and even religious Manichaean worldview.21 This discourse that builds powerful identities is what allows for populist mobilization, as Robert Jansen shows in chapter 6. Populism is also a political strategy to achieve power and to govern, allegedly, on behalf of the people, by bypassing existing institutions.22 Kenneth Roberts defines populism in chapter 5 as “a political strategy for appealing to mass constituencies where representative institutions are weak or discredited, and where various forms of social exclusion or political marginalization leave citizens alienated from such institutions.”
The essays in this book illustrate how discursive and political definitions are useful for comparative analysis. The conceptions of the people that most Latin American, African, and Thai populists employ seek to empower (politically, economically, and culturally) excluded segments of the population, whereas the people as conceived by Australian, European, and American populists exclude those considered to have alien cultural values. Whereas fragile political institutions allow populists to get to power, consolidated and strong institutions in Australia, Europe, and the United States confine populist movements and parties to the margins of their political systems.
Even though scholars who use political and discursive theories disagree on the merits of other approaches, they share views that integrate politics and economics. Kenneth Roberts (chapter 5) and Danielle Resnick (chapter 11), who favor political definitions, link populism to broader societal transformations that contribute to the realignment of parties and institutions. From a different theoretical perspective, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s analysis of the supply and demand sides of populism in chapter 7 integrates structural socioeconomic processes with agency. Roberts, Resnick, and Rovira Kaltwasser illustrate how politics is not simply derivative from the economy. Their chapters illustrate the merits of incorporating the interaction of economic, political, and ideological factors into the study of populism.
The Virtuous and Mythical People of Populism
Scholars and activists have challenged the image of the dangerous mob by portraying the people as the mythical bearer of virtue. Jules Michelet, the historian of the French Revolution, exalted the people as the “embodiment of two treasures: first is the virtue of sacrifice, and second are instinctual ways of life that are more precious than the sophisticated knowledge of the so-called cultured men.”23 Mikhail Bakunin wrote, “the people is the only source of moral truth … and I have in mind the scoundrel, the dregs, uncontaminated by bourgeois civilization.”24
Populism is a politics of cultural and symbolic recognition of the despised underclasses.25 It transforms the humiliations that the rabble, the uncultured, the unseen, and those who have no voice have to endure in their daily life into sources of dignity and even redemption. Paraphrasing Rancière, “it consists in making what was unseen visible, in making what was audible as mere noise heard as speech.”26 Those who are excluded and stigmatized with administrative categories such as “the poor,” “the informal,” and “the marginal” become “the people” conceived as the incarnation of all virtue. And the elites, who constantly humiliate them, become moral reprobates.
Populist politicians are famous for turning the stigmas of the people into virtues. Juan and Eva Perón transformed the shirtless masses despised by the elites into the embodiment of the Argentinean nation. The feared rabble became the “beloved rabble” of the Colombian populist Jorge Eliecer Gaitán. When his followers were depicted as a bunch of “whores and criminals,” the Ecuadorian populist Abdalá Bucaram responded: “the marihuana user, criminal, and whore is the Ecuadorian oligarchy.”27
The category of “the people” is personified in their leader. The Front National put Jean-Marie Le Pen at the center: “Le Pen = Le Peuple.” His slogan in the 1988 campaign was, “Give voice to the people.” Because populists use a moral and Manichaean discourse, the people does not face political adversaries but sinful enemies. Hugo Chávez, for example, “constantly separates the ‘people,’ the ‘true’ patriots, from the ‘oligarchy,’ those self-serving elites who work against the homeland. During the general strike in 2002 called by the opposition, Chavez declared, ‘this is not about the pro-Chavez against the anti-Chavez … but … the patriots against the enemies of the homeland.’ ”28 Enemies are constructed with a moralistic logic as not “sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place.”29 Unlike adversaries who fight according to a shared set of rules and whose positions could be accepted, enemies represent an evil threat that must be eradicated.
Populist rhetoric assembles all social, economic, cultural, and ethnic differentiations and oppressions into two irreconcilable poles: the pure people versus the evil, corrupt elites. The notion of the people incorporates the idea of antagonistic conflict between two groups, with a romantic view of the purity of the people. As a result, “the people” of populism has been imagined as an undifferentiated, unified, fixed, and homogeneous entity.30 The populist image of the people is fixed in time, and the will of the people is conceived as transparent, so to speak, especially when they resist and challenge the symbolic, economic, and political domination of the oligarchy. But as Paulina Ochoa Espejo shows in chapter 2, the people is a process, an unfolding series of events. “The people,” she writes, “is always under construction and for this reason its will is also incomplete.”31
Liberals construct the people, Ochoa Espejo argues, with criteria of self-limitation. They view the people as indeterminate, accept the view that the will of the people can and probably will change, and for this reason “their appeal to the people’s will is fallible, temporary, and incomplete.” Unlike self-limited constructions of the people, populists adopt views of revolutionary transformation understood as the overhaul of all existing institutions that oppress the people. “The people” of populism is conceived as inherently correct; their voice is always indefeasible. Therefore populists do not accept limitations on their claims to be the authentic and truthful voice of the people. All institutions need to be re-created in order to bring about the people’s redemption.
Religious images are oft en used in essentialist narratives of the people. The Christian story of paradise lost, sin, and redemption epitomizes the saga of the people, the proletariat, the indigenous, or the nation. Allusions to an idyllic past free of domination that was lost due to the imposition of alien cultural and economic systems are also all too common within populism. The role of the liberator is to free the people from their suffering in order to let their true and uncorrupted essence flourish again. In chapter 8, José Pedro Zúquete shows how the European New Right aims to reinvent and rebuild a communitarian model of society “in which democracy is rooted on collective interests and solidarity.” Democracy, according to Alain de Benoist, the ideologue of the New Right, would be “direct, organic, and communitarian.” The advent of Evo Morales, the left-wing leader of the coca growers union, to the presidency of Bolivia in 2006 was linked by his indigenous supporters to the Pachakuti, “the founding event or break in historical time in which an unjust world is destroyed and a new one is born, renovated, and redeemed.”32 The new Bolivian constitution, Nancy Postero writes in chapter 14, aimed to refound the nation, decolonize Bolivian society, and to establish an indigenous communitarian democracy. Some members of the Morales government conceived of his administration as the beginning of the end of colonialism, capitalism, and bourgeois representative democracy. Bolivia’s minister of foreign relations, David Choquehuanca, argued that Bolivia, which had been living in an “age of darkness,” was now moving toward communitarianism, understood as the end of hatred and capitalism and the beginning of love.33
The mythical and essentialist constructions of the people attempt to restore the dignity of those constructed as having no voice. Yet, these mythical interpretations, even in cases where “the people” refers to the excluded, can have authoritarian undertones. Postero shows how the image of the indigenous people under Morales’s government excludes indigenous people who oppose his administration’s policies, such as the construction of roads in indigenous territories. In the name of the people, Hugo Chávez, as Margarita López Maya shows in chapter 13, was replacing the institutional foundation of constitutional democracy with an authoritarian communal state. The exclusionary meanings of the virtuous people become even more salient under right-wing populism. The people as conceived by Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, and Pauline Hanson, for example, excludes immigrants, who embody alien and threatening cultural values.
In their effort to give a voice to those who have no voice, populists may open the door to authoritarian fantasies. If the people is assumed to be homogeneous, if images of the people do not acknowledge the internal divisions of the people and individuals and groups in society, there is a danger of creating an image of the People as One.34 Benjamín Arditi writes that “Lefort associates this with the emergence of totalitarian phenomena, but the fantasy of a unity without fissures is equally present in the populist temptation to confuse the government with the state.”35
The Bodies of the People
Inspired by Kantarowicz’s seminal book The King’s Two Bodies, scholars write about the people’s two bodies.36 The people is individual and collective, active and passive, whole and part, the despised mob and the redeeming People that on occasion rise up in unison against injustices. According to Kantarowicz, the king, like God, was “omnipresent, for in himself he constituted the ‘body politic’ over which he ruled. But like his son whom God sent to redeem mankind, he was man as well as God; he had a ‘body natural’ as well as his body politic, and the two were inseparable like the persons of the Trinity.”37 Edmund Morgan writes that the fiction of the divine rights of kings, however dubious his divinity might seem, did not have to be imagined: “He was a visible presence, wearing his crown and carrying his sceptre.”38 The king’s body was mortal and time bound, as well as immortal and eternal. It was imagined as individual as well as collective.
Unlike the king, who had a corporeal body, “the very existence of such a thing as the people, capable of acting to empower, define, and limit a previously nonexistent government required a suspension of disbelief.”39
The people are never visible as such. Before we ascribe sovereignty to the people we have to imagine that there is such a thing, something we personify as though it were a single body, capable of thinking, of acting, of making decisions and carrying them out, something quite apart from government, superior to government, and able to alter or remove a government at will, a collective entity more powerful and less fallible than a king or that an individual within it or any group of individuals it singles out to govern.40
Once the immortal body of the king and the body of the politic were decapitated during the revolutions of the eighteenth century, the space occupied by the religious-political body of the king was opened. Claude Lefort writes that power was no longer linked to a body: “Power appears as an empty place and those who exercise it as merely mortals who occupy it only temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning.”41 Under democracy, the people of today are not necessarily the people of tomorrow, as the power of today is not the power of tomorrow.42 Under democracy, as Andrew Arato and Paulina Ochoa Espejo argue in their respective chapters, the image of the people “remains indeterminate.”
In his book Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, Lefort explains:
Liberal democracy was born from the rejection of monarchical domination, from the collectively shared discovery that power does not belong to anyone, that those who exercise it do not incarnate it, that they are only temporary trustees of public authority, that the law of God or nature is not vested in them, that they do not hold the final knowledge of the world and social orders, and that they are not capable of deciding what everyone has the right to do, think, say, and understand.43
The uncertainty of democracy, where power belongs to the people in the abstract but not to a concrete individual who at most could occupy it only temporarily, could lead to the destruction of democracy. According to Claude Lefort, the revolutions of the eighteenth century also generated “from the outset the principle that would threaten the emptiness of that space: popular sovereignty in the sense of a subject incarnated in a group, however extensive, a stratum however poor, and institution or a person, however popular.”44 Totalitarianism, thus, “appears as a forced attempt, a crazed attempt to fill up, even to saturate the empty place.”45 Symbolically, this is done by abandoning the democratic imagination of the people as “heterogeneous, multiple, and in conflict” and living in a society where power does not belong to any individual.46 Under totalitarianism, there are no internal divisions within the people. The divide is between the people—imagined as having one identity and one will—and its external enemies, which need to be eliminated in order to maintain the healthy body of the people.
Lefort conceives of democracy and totalitarianism as opposites. He does not analyze the gradations between the extremes of total emptiness and embodiment,47 nor does he differentiate between totalitarian projects and regimes.48 Totalitarian projects might be resisted by civil society and might not end up becoming totalitarian regimes. Populism lies between democracy and totalitarianism. Unlike under totalitarianism, power under populism is not embodied permanently in the proletariat, the nation, the party, or the Egocrat. The political theorist Isidoro Cheresky argues that power in populism is semi-embodied because populists claim legitimacy through winning open and free elections that they could conceivably lose and thus be bound by electoral results.49 Yet because populists simultaneously assume that they embody the will of the people, that the will of the people is always right, and that they are fighting against corrupt and morally reprehensible elites, they might have a hard time accepting that they could lose popular elections. For example, Paulina Ochoa Espejo argues in chapter 2 that the populist Mexican leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador challenged the electoral results, arguing that elites had stolen the presidential elections in 2006 and again in 2012. Ochoa Espejo writes that for López Obrador, “the people is always right, and thus it can have only one unified voice and will. This means that, in his view, it was ‘morally impossible’ that the other camp could win.”
Similarly, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador views elections as the ultimate expression of the people’s will, as did the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Their democratic credentials are grounded in their winning open and clean elections that, in theory, they could lose. Since participating in elections opened the possibility of their defeat, these leaders skewed the electoral playing field. As incumbents, they had extraordinary advantages such as using the media, selectively silencing the privately owned media, selectively harassing the opposition, controlling electoral tribunal boards and all instances of appeal, and using public funds to influence the election. When Chávez and Correa won elections, the voting process was clean, but the electoral process blatantly favored incumbents. For instance, before the elections of October 2012, Chávez massively increased social spending, launching new initiatives that focused on housing, social security benefits for those who were not part of the system, and cash subsidies for the children of adolescent parents.50
Unlike Correa, who has been campaigning since he became president in 2007, the opposition had only forty-two days to campaign during the February 2013 Ecuadorean elections. Correa pressed the incumbent’s advantage by using televised broadcasts that all stations are required to air, to challenge media reports that his running mate, Jorge Glass, had plagiarized his college thesis from the Internet. The government used state media outlets to broadcast live from Correa’s campaign trail. According to Participación Ciudadana, a NGO that monitored the election, Correa’s exposure on television was more than double that of his rivals. In order to assure a majority in the new Assembly, additional electoral districts were created in Quito and Guayaquil, two strongholds of Correa. The National Electoral Council did not stop the incumbent from using state resources to further his election bid, such as when Correa used army helicopters in his campaign. Neither did the Electoral Council control how pro-Correa propaganda was broadcast in the state-run media, although it forced the left-wing ticket to withdraw a televised ad entitled “The Little King and His Court,” alleging that it was offensive to President Correa. The government regulated how privately owned media reported the campaign and prohibited them from endorsing candidates. As a result, toward the end of the election campaign, most newspapers stopped publishing photographs and stories about it.51
Their use of public resources, their abuse of their control over the media, and the lack of any governmental restraints on this behavior led some scholars to characterize the practices of these left-wing populist regimes as “competitive authoritarianism.”52 Although these politicians claim legitimacy as the winners of open and free elections, that democratic legitimacy is undercut if the incumbents fail to respect the institutions of pluralism, the recognition of the rights of minorities, and the principle of alternation.53
“The People”: Between Everyday Politics and Eschatological Salvation
The people could be conceived of as a collection of individuals who participate in political institutions and, simultaneously, as a collective body “that establishes these institutions and has a final say on their legitimacy.”54 These two views of the people—as individual actors of everyday politics and as the foundation of democratic legitimacy—gave form to what Margaret Canovan refers to as the “two phases of democracy.” Democracy, according to Canovan, has a pragmatic and a redemptive phase, and they are oft en in tension with each other. From a pragmatic point of view, democracy is a form of government that allows society to cope peacefully with conflicts. It is made of institutions that limit the power of the governing few, as well as the governed. Yet democracy also has a redemptive phase: “The content of democracy’s redemptive promise is power to the people; we, the people, are to take charge of our lives and to decide our own future.”55
Canovan’s example of Solidarity in Poland nicely illustrates how the people—conceived simultaneously as the source of sovereign legitimacy, the underdog, and the nation—acted as a mythical collectivity against a regime that grounded its legitimacy as a people’s democracy.56 Yet this was perhaps an exceptional case. Most oft en actors stage rebellions claiming to speak for the people as a whole, while in fact excluding many from their mythical conceptions. For instance, in the insurrections against neoliberalism and the rule of corrupt political parties in Bolivia and Ecuador—which I analyze in chapter 12—entire geographical regions did not join in these insurrections. Large segments of the population had no voice in how these governments were toppled. In Venezuela, due to populist polarization, crowds demanding that Chávez should be ousted from power thought of themselves as the embodiment of the sovereign people, when in fact they excluded large segments of the population, especially the poor, who saw Chávez as their legitimate president.
Canovan is well aware of the possible threat to democracy posed by mythical conceptions of the people. There is a danger that the empty space becomes permanently occupied, and that democracy could degenerate into authoritarian populism. As Andrew Arato argues in chapter 1, Ernesto Laclau’s influential theory of populism, due to its Schmittian view of the political as the struggle between friend and enemy, and its theological and voluntaristic conception of the mythical people, could be used to justify authoritarians that threaten democracy. In his book On Populist Reason, Laclau argues that populism is synonymous with the political. He contrasts the logics of difference and the logics of equivalence. The first presupposes that “any legitimate demand can be satisfied in a non-antagonistic, administrative way.”57 Unlike differences that can be resolved on an individual basis with administrative logic, there are demands that cannot be resolved individually and that aggregate themselves into an equivalential chain. Under the logic of equivalence, “all the demands in spite of their differential character, tend to aggregate themselves,” becoming “fighting demands” that cannot be resolved by the institutional system.58 The social space splits into two camps: power and the underdog.59 The logic of populist articulation is anti-institutional; it is based on the construction of an enemy; and in equivalential terms that lead to the rupture of the system because individual demands cannot be processed. In populism, the name of the leader becomes an empty signifier “to which a multiplicity of meanings could be attributed.”60 The function of empty signifiers “is to bring to equivalential homogeneity a highly heterogeneous reality[;] they can only do so by reducing to a minimum their particularistic content. At the limit, this process reaches a point where the homogenizing function is carried out by a pure name: the name of the leader.”61
As the pair of terms used by Laclau illustrates, everyday mundane and administrative politics are contrasted to those exceptional moments of a populist rupture. He argues that the division of society into two antagonistic camps is required in order to put an end to exclusionary institutional systems and to forge an alternative order.62 By giving normative priority to the populist rupture, Laclau embraces myths of the revolution as the over-haul of all existing institutions, and as the dream of total discontinuity with a given order. As in Leninist voluntaristic constructs, any positive reformist improvement is ruled out by normative eschatological constructions of revolutionary politics.
Ernesto Laclau became a public intellectual who not only advocated the need for populist ruptures, but who advised the current Argentinean president, Cristina Kirchner, and her predecessor, Ernesto Kirchner, on how to constitute such a popular subject. He decried that the relatively strong Argentinian institutions and complex civil society are impediments to a populist rupture.63 His models for successful ruptures are those of Perón and Chávez, two former military leaders of ambiguous democratic credentials. Because the new populist regime needs to destroy the old exclusionary institutional order, populist leaders and/or their coalitions might be required to stay in power until their job is done. Laclau’s theory, as Arato argues in chapter 1, therefore opens the door for authoritarian fantasies of power as a possession. Because the political is, as Carl Schmitt writes, a struggle between friend and enemy, it is difficult to imagine adversaries who have legitimate institutional spaces. Unlike Chantal Mouffe’s adversarial model of the political, where adversaries have legitimate roles, in Schmitt’s view, enemies might need to be manufactured and destroyed.
The politics of populist rupture led to the polarization of Venezuelan society into two irreconcilable camps. Chávez supporters transformed political rivals into “the squalid.” They are not viewed as political opponents but are instead characterized as “enemies of the homeland, anti-democratic oligarchs, and potential terrorists.” Chávez’s supporters are stigmatized by the opposition as “the marginal”: “poor, ignorant, primitive and violent.”64
Andrew Arato argues in chapter 1 that since, for Laclau, the empirical people does not exist as a fixed and definable entity but is, rather, a popularly negotiated concept, the critical question is, Who will create such a people? Is it the role of the theorist of populism, or of the populist leader, to forge a homogeneous popular subject that will challenge the elite’s oppressive institutional order? Is Laclau advocating, as Arato powerfully argues, for the need to extricate the mythical people from the real people?
Who Speaks for the People?
When “the people” is invoked, we need to explain who is claiming to speak on its behalf. Politics is a matter of establishing who speaks for the people.65 The people can speak through insurrections, voting to delegate power to representatives, or by identification between a leader and the led. Jacques Rancière questions the normative divide between revolt understood as spontaneous, and revolution as organized and planned.66 Building on Rancière, Benjamín Arditi illustrates in chapter 4 how, during insurgencies, issues that were treated as nonpolitical become politicized. He analyzes the Arab Spring and student mobilizations in Chile to illustrate how insurgencies that are episodic and extraordinary are “passageways between worlds” and ways of “enacting the promise of something other to come.” Unlike those who criticize insurgents for not having a plan, he argues that “insurgencies rather than their proposals are the plan because they aim to modify the boundaries of the given and the narratives through which we make sense of it.”
Rebellions and revolutions give the impression that “the people comes into existence through collective action, somehow emerging as both the director and actor of its own destiny.”67 During extraordinary events, the people acquire a face and a voice, and are given an imaginary social cohesion. Doubts about how a group of individuals could become a unitary actor with a single voice are suspended. It is imagined that the people could speak by directly taking over the symbols of state power that excluded them, while simultaneously creating new symbols and institutions.
Arditi writes in chapters 3 and 4 that insurrections are extraordinary events of the ephemeral moments of disturbance that Jacques Rancière conceptualizes as politics. Rancière distinguishes the order of the police from politics. The order of the police is based on the delegation of power to representatives, and on a view of “the people as political subject to the population, that is to a socioeconomic category decomposable into its constituent empirical categories.”68 Politics, Arditi writes in chapter 3, is out of the ordinary; “it disturbs or tries to interrupt the accepted sequences that connect names, places, function, and hierarchies because those sequences harm equality.” The essence of politics, Rancière writes, consists “in disturbing this arrangement…. It consists in re-figuring space; that is what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it.”69
Even if we accept that the people during extraordinary events can temporarily speak in unison to say “enough,” their collective action does not solve the problem of what happens after the event. Rosanvallon writes, “how can (the people) retain a recognizable form, and how to hear its disappeared voice once the event is over and done?”70 Liberals and populists give alternative answers to the question of how the people speaks when it is not insurrecting. Representation is based on a constitutive gap between “the people as the legitimate sovereign, in its unity in principle, and the people as an existing society, in its actual complexity.”71 How to preserve the complexity of society while appealing to the unity of the sovereign people? Mediated forms of representation accept the complexity and diversity of the people in an existing society, whereas populist representation seeks its unity in the embodiment of the people in the figure or in the name of a leader.
Mediated forms of representation are based on the principle of nonidentity between representatives and their constituency. A collectivity “authorizes some individuals to speak for it, and eventually to commit the collectivity to what the representative decides.”72 Representatives, for their part, are accountable for their actions. Liberal representation is based on a series of mediations such as constitutional restraints, divisions of powers, and check and balances. As Kenneth Roberts theorizes in chapter 5, populism is a response to a crisis of representation. It is a form of outsider politics that occurs when a sizeable number of voters or potential voters “are alienated or detached from established parties and political elites.” Roberts differentiates between a crisis of political exclusion that might occur during the initial stages of mass political incorporation; a crisis of weak or poorly institutionalized representation; and a crisis due to the lack of responsiveness or accountability of well-entrenched cartel parties. Crises of political representation are linked to broader societal transformations that undermine political institutions such as party systems and other forms of institutionalized political representation.
Populism is a response to the crises of mediated representation. Populists see mediations and restraints as impediments that the elite use to exclude the people. Populists see elections as the “decisive moment of the representative contract.”73 Elections are understood as processes of popular authorization that subsequently exclude any element of accountability. For example, after winning the election of 1949, General Juan Perón said, “we have given the people the opportunity to choose, in the cleanest elections in the history of Argentina, between us and our opponents. The people have elected us, so the problem is resolved. What we want is now done in the republic of Argentina.”74
Populist representation is based on the “merging and full identity between a representative and those who seek representation.”75 Because the leader claims to be like the people, he knows their interest and can incarnate their will. Under populism, “the people” is imagined as sharing an identity, interests, and forming a collective body “which is able to express this will and take decisions.”76 The leader perceives himself not as an ordinary politician elected in a succession of temporarily elected officials. Rather, he sees himself as the incarnation of the people.77 The fantasy of the unity of the people and of their merging with the leader “opens the door for a perception of the exercise of political power as a possession rather than as occupancy, which in turn is conducive to a patrimonial use of state resources.”78 Citizens become grateful masses that accept resources distributed from the top down.79
Politicians are not the only actors who claim to be the voice or the spokesmen of the people. Social movement activists also claim to speak for them, and to be their representatives, even their embodiment. Activists and dissenters, including populist politicians who challenge the rule of elites, claim to speak for the people. Their interventions aim to disrupt the normalcy of the status quo. Dissenters destabilize the common sense that gives authority to the voices of some people of the community and that recognizes some issues as valid and important. A dissensus is “a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given.”80 It is “a practice of disidentification whereby the people refuse to accept the place—oft en of the excluded underdog—assigned to them.”81 For example, Rancière writes that workers “spoke in order to say that they were not those Others, those ‘barbarians’ that bourgeois discourse denounced.”82
Challenges to the exclusion of those considered to have no voice and to those whose issues are interpreted as irrelevant or particularistic are, of course, potentially democratizing. This type of intervention is what gives democratic credentials to populist and social movement activists. The question is how they will process these demands. Will they entail a deepening of democracy, maintaining its representative fabric, mediations, and checks and balances, which allow for pluralism and contestation? Or will they lead to Jacobin symbolic appropriations of the people’s will,83 and to attempts to occupy the open space of democracy?
The Book’s Structure
This volume is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “The People and Populism,” explores different theoretical and normative conceptualizations of the ambiguous concepts of the people and populism. These chapters offer new perspectives on how to study populism. In chapter 1, Andrew Arato discusses the return of political theology in the work of Ernesto Laclau. He argues that political theology sacralizes nontheological concepts like territory or population into the “sacred homeland” or the “People.” The reintroduction of theological concepts does not allow for rational and secular debate and instead could lead to the emergence of authoritarian regimes, justified in the name of the mythical “people” or nation.
Chapter 2, by Paulina Ochoa Espejo, distinguishes between liberal and populist views of the people. Whereas the first is based on the concept of self-limitation, which means the abandonment of “the horizon of a total revolution or an absolute discontinuity with the old regime,”84 populist-theological conceptions assume that the will of the mythical “people” is transparent, fixed in time, and available for a leader to incarnate its will. Taken together, these two chapters illustrate the dangers of the myth of revolutionary overhaul of all institutions in the name of the people. Arato and Ochoa Espejo argue for the need to seek a balance between constituent power understood as the power of the people in motion that founds and grounds a political regime, and constitutive power based on existing constitutional and institutional arrangements. Projects of social transformation that do away with the notions of constitutive power and self-limitation could lead to authoritarian outcomes because they are based on Jacobin interpretations of “constituent power as an unbound foundational force promoting a total rupture with the past.”85
Benjamín Arditi offers an alternative interpretation, one that is less critical of the inherent authoritarian danger of populism. In chapter 3, he distinguishes between the people as event and as representation. The people as event, he writes, is “a subversive force appearing from time to time as a combustion of energy aimed at transforming the given.” The people as representation is the constitutive power. According to liberal constructs, it provides the foundations for the business of running the sociopolitical machinery of government and the state. He argues that populist understandings of the people as representation do not differ substantially from liberal views as long as they stick to a democratic narrative and setting: “The populist simulation of the people (whose unity is expressed in the leader or the movement) is no different from the liberal democratic invocation of programs and party loyalty.” Arditi is, of course, aware of the potential undemocratic outcomes of populism when it abandons democratic imaginaries and rules of the game, yet his chapters seek to portray the emancipatory potential of insurgencies.
In chapter 4, “Insurgencies Don’t Have a Plan—They Are the Plan,” Arditi argues that the actions of insurgents challenge the certainty of given social and institutional arrangements. He shows how rebellions as distinct as the Chilean student movement or the Arab Spring open the possibility of imagining and creating alternative social arrangements. Arditi’s favorable evaluation of insurrections as constituent moments, and the distinction between the people as event and representation open up interesting lines of research. To begin with, and as José Pedro Zúquete argues in chapter 8, the relationships between populism and authoritarianism or democratization are open. Populism might either regenerate democracy or undermine it. If Arato and Ochoa Espejo illustrate the threats of populism to democratization, Arditi rescues the probabilities for emancipation under populist events.
Kenneth Roberts, in chapter 5, brings political economy back into the analysis of populism. Roberts convincingly shows how populism is linked to crises of representation that in turn are linked to broader social and economic transformations. The potential authoritarian or democratizing effects of populism will vary in the different types of crises of representation. Of course, under the initial incorporation of excluded groups, populism could have more democratizing effects. Under poorly institutionalized systems, populist rupture could and has led to the further weakening of democratic institutions and to the establishment of competitive authoritarian regimes.
In chapter 6, Robert Jansen conceptualizes populism as a form of mobilization based on a Manichaean discourse of the people against the oligarchy and as a process of political mobilization. Jansen’s approach works for a Latin American context, and restricts populism to geographical and historical bound episodes of contention. If Roberts locates populism within the transformation of the political economy, Jansen opens the study of populist mobilization to approaches that focus both on the action of leaders or political elites, and to the analysis of populist episodes of contention from the bottom up. His chapter also contributes a remarkable critical review of the debates on populism in Latin America.
In chapter 7, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser uses a minimal ideological or discursive definition of populism and illustrates its usefulness for the comparative study of these phenomena in Europe and the Americas. Rovira Kaltwasser reviews different explanations of the reemergence of populism focusing on demand and supply side explanations, and on the influence of the international context. He includes a discussion of negative cases to strengthen his theoretical plea for the usefulness of a minimal ideological definition for comparative analyses. His impressive review of different bodies of populist scholarship in the United States, Latin America, and Europe also works as a nice transition to the second part of this volume.
Part 2, “Global Populism,” includes chapters on Europe, the United States, Australia, Thailand, Africa, and Latin America. The essays in this section illustrate the similarities and differences in populism across the globe, moving the debate beyond its usual geographical confines. José Pedro Zúquete, in chapter 8, studies European right-wing populism. He focuses on parties, social movements, and intellectual movements to illustrate the populist distrust of liberal representative institutions, advocating instead for direct and even communitarian models of democracy. George Michael, in chapter 9, analyzes the rise and characteristics of the Tea Party in the United States in historical perspective. He also illustrates the convergences and differences between the Tea Party and extreme right-wing movements. Chapter 10, by Benjamin Moffitt, compares Pauline Hanson of Australia, whose populism is similar to that of the European and American Right, with the leadership of Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawartra, which shares characteristics with Latin American populism. He compares the symbolic, political, and socioeconomic inclusionary and exclusionary aspects of populism in the Asia Pacific region with Latin America and Europe. Danielle Resnick, in chapter 11, analyzes populism in Africa. She focuses on the cases of Michael Sata of Zambia, Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal, and Jacob Zuma in South Africa. Using a political and strategic definition of populism, she illustrates the ambiguous effects of populism for democratization in Africa and Latin America.
The next three chapters focus on Latin America. In chapter 12, I analyze how the concepts of the people and democracy were deployed during the rebellions against neoliberalism in Ecuador and Bolivia, and were used to justify coups d’état in Venezuela and Ecuador. Chapter 13, by Margarita López Maya, illustrates how the notion of the people shift ed in Chávez’s Venezuela from grounding the institution of participatory democracy to an authoritarian project. She illustrates in detail how Chávez’s project of “twenty-first century socialism” and the “communal state” aims to replace constitutional democracy with an authoritarian regime. Since the death of Chávez, the authoritarian traits of his project are taking precedence over any attempt to establish participatory democracy. Nancy Postero, in chapter 14, focuses on the ambiguous understandings of the term “the people” in Evo Morales’s Bolivia. She illustrates how the notion of the plurinational people of Bolivia is simultaneously used to democratize and even decolonize Bolivia, but also to marginalize those indigenous populations that oppose the policies of the Morales administration.
In the conclusion, Cas Mudde uses the rich body of empirical and theoretical contributions of our collaborators to point to new lines of research. His essay illustrates the advantages of using minimal definitions of populism for comparative analysis. He advocates for the need to combine the supply and demand sides of populism. His conclusion delineates the role of political institutions and of the level of national development in order to illustrate the authoritarian and/or democratizing outcomes of populism movements and regimes.
Notes
1. Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in the Andes,” Democratization 20, no. 1 (2013): 116–17; Kurt Weyland, “The Threat from the Populist Left,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (July 2013): 18–32.
2. Ernesto Laclau, “Consideraciones sobre el populismo latinoamericano,” Cuadernos del CENDES 23, no. 64 (2006): 115–20; D. L. Raby, Democracy and Revolution: Latin American and Socialism Today (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
3. For comparative studies of European populism, see, for example, Yves Mèny and Ives Surel, eds., Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Danielle Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, eds., Twenty-First-Century Populism: The Specter of Western European Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2008). For comparative studies of populism in Latin America, see Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia J. Arnson, eds., Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century (Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013); Carlos de la Torre and Enrique Peruzzotti, eds., El retorno del pueblo (Quito: FLACSO–Ecuador, 2008). For comparative studies of populism in Europe and the Americas, see Guy Hermet, Soledad Loeza, and Jean François Prud´homme, Del populismo de los antiguos and populismo de los modernos (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2001); Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds., Populism in Europe and the Americas: Corrective or Threat to Democracy? (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
4. Sofia Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” Political Theory 35, no. 3 (2007): 324.
5. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, (London and New York: Verso 2005), 224; Ernesto Laclau “Populism: What’s in a name?” in Francisco Panizza, ed., Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London: Verso, 2005), 48.
6. Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 84–85.
7. Bernard Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” Political Theory 29, no. 4 (2001): 521.
8. Margaret Canovan, The People (Cambridge U.K.: Polity Press, 2005), 123.
9. Alan Knight, “Populism and Neopopulism in Latin America, especially Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 2 (1998): 226.
10. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2010), 32, 33.
11. Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” 525.
12. Rogers Smith, “Citizenship and the Politics of People-Building,” Citizenship Studies 5, no. 1 (2001): 73–96.
13. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a People?,” in Means Without End: Note on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 31.
14. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 376.
15. Ibid., 378.
16. Rancière, Dissensus, 38.
17. Jacques Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletariat and His Double (New York: Verso, 2011), 37.
18. Gino Germani, “La integración de las masas a la vida política y el totalitarismo,” in Política y sociedad en una época de transición (1956; Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1971), 337.
19. Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia J. Arnson, “The Evolution of Latin American Populism and the Debates over Its Meaning,” in Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. de la Torre and Arnson (Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013), 1–44.
20. For a critique to pathological analyses of European populism, see Cas Mudde, “The Populist Right: A Pathological Normalcy,” West European Politics 33, no. 6 (2010): 1167–86.
21. José Álvarez Junco, El emperador del paralelo: Lerroux y la demagogia populista (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990); Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, 2nd ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Kirk Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Knight, “Populism and Neopopulism in Latin America, especially Mexico,” 223–48; Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (2004): 541–63; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, eds., Populism in Europe and the Americas; Francisco Panizza, “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 1–32; Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, “The Ambivalence of Populism: Threat or Corrective for Democracy?”: Democratization 19, no. 2 (2012): 184–208.
22. Kenneth Roberts, “Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America: The Peruvian Case,” World Politics 48 (October 1995): 82–116; Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics,” Comparative Politics 34, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
23. José Álvarez Junco, “Magia y ética en la retórica política,” in Populismo, caudillaje y discurso demagógico, ed. Álvarez Junco (Madrid: Centro de investigaciones Sociológicas, 1987), 251.
24. Ibid., 253.
25. Francisco Panizza, “What Do We Mean When We Talk about Populism?,” in Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia Arnson (Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013).
26. Rancière, Dissensus, 38.
27. These examples come from de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, 80–118.
28. José Pedro Zúquete, “The Missionary Politics of Hugo Chavez,” Latin American Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2008): 105.
29. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 20.
30. Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Sphere in Latin America (Prince ton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 2002), 72.
31. See also Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
32. Charles Lindholm and José Pedro Zúquete, The Struggle for the World: Liberation Movements for the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 40.
33. Mabel Azcui, “Bolivia anuncia una nueva era sin capitalismo ni Coca Cola,” El País, http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2012/08/01/actualidad/1343840750_594247.html.
34. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).
35. Benjamín Arditi, “Populism as an Internal Periphery of Democratic Politics,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 96.
36. Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in En gland and America (New York: Norton, 1988); Sheldon S. Wolin, “The People’s Two Bodies,” Democracy 1, no. 1 (1981): 9–24; Fernando Coronil, The Magical State, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future; Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism”; Agamben, “What Is a People?,” 28–34.
37. Morgan, Inventing the People, 17.
38. Ibid., 153.
39. Ibid., 58.
40. Ibid., 153.
41. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 303.
42. Pierre Rosanvallon, “The Test of the Political: A Conversation with Claude Lefort,” Constellations 19, no. 1 (2012): 9.
43. Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 114.
44. Andrew Arato, “Lefort, the Philosopher of 1989,” Constellations 19, no. 1 (2012): 23.
45. Rosanvallon, “The Test of the Political,” 11.
46. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, 297.
47. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 166.
48. Arato, “Lefort, the Philosopher of 1989,” 28.
49. Isidoro Cheresky, “Mutación democrática, otra ciudadanía, otras representaciones,” in ¿Qué Democracia en América Latina?, ed. Cheresky (Buenos Aires: CLACSO Prometeo, 2012), 33.
50. Margarita López Maya and Luis Lander, “Las elecciones de octubre del 2012 en Venezuela y el Debate de la democracia en América Latina,” manuscript, 2012.
51. Carlos de la Torre, “Technocratic Populism in Ecuador,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (July 2013): 33–46.
52. Kurt Weyland, “The Threat from the Populist Left,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (July 2013): 18–32; Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism”; de la Torre, “Technocratic Populism in Ecuador.”
53. Lefort, Complications, 78.
54. Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” 519.
55. Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 11.
56. Canovan, The People, 136.
57. Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 36.
58. Ibid., 37
59. Ibid., 43.
60. Francisco Panizza, “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 19.
61. Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” 40.
62. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 122.
63. Oswaldo Iazeta, “Democracia y dramatización del conflicto en la Argentina kirchnerista (2003–2011),” in ¿Qué democracia en América Latina?, ed. Isidoro Chreresky (Buenos Aires: CLACSO and Promoteo, 2012), 285; Vicente Palermo, “Intelectuales del príncipe: Intelectuales y populismo en la Argentina de hoy” Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Católica del Uriguay RECSO, Montevideo Uruguay, vol. 2, 2011, 81–102.
64. Federico Tarragoni, “El pueblo Escondido de Chávez: Línesa programáticas para una sociología del populismo desde abajo,” Rúbrica Contemporánea 2, no. 3 (2013): 33.
65. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 48.
66. Rancière, Staging the People, 10.
67. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 96.
68. Steven Corcoran, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, by Jacques Rancière (New York: Continuum, 2010), 5.
69. Rancière, Dissensus, 36–37.
70. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 97.
71. Ibid., 91.
72. Guillermo O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (1994): 61.
73. Enrique Peruzzotti, “Populism in Democratic Times: Populism, Representative Democracy, and the Debate on Democratic Deepening,” in Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia Arnson (Baltimore and Washington, D.C.: Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013), 98.
74. Ibid., 97.
75. David Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy,” Constellations 4, no. 1 (April 1997): 28.
76. Koen Abts and Stefan Rummens, “Populism versus Democracy,” Political Studies 55 (2007): 409.
77. Enrique Peruzzotti, “Populismo y Representación Democrática,” in El retorno del pueblo: El populismo y nuevas democracias en América Latina, ed. Carlos de la Torre and Peruzzotti (Quito: FLACSO, 2008), 110.
78. Benjamín Arditi, Politics at the Edge of Liberalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 83.
79. Ibid., 86.
80. Rancière, Dissensus, 69.
81. Arditi, Politics at the Edge of Liberalism, 78–79.
82. Rancière, Staging the People, 22.
83. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 73.
84. Enrique Peruzzotti and Martín Plot, “Introduction: The Political and Social Thought of Andrew Arato,” in Critical Theory and Democracy: Civil Society, Dictatorship, and Constitutionalism in Andrew Arato’s Democratic Theory, ed. Peruzzotti and Plot (New York: Routledge 2013), 7.
85. Ibid., 10.