Kenneth M. Roberts
As a political rallying cry, “power to the people” is widely used—and surely abused—by a vast array of popular movements with distinct social bases and diverse ideological inspirations. The phrase has a special association with populism, which explicitly seeks to empower “the people,” however defined, in opposition to established political, economic, and/or cultural elites. But what, precisely, does it mean to empower the people? As the chapter by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser in this volume suggests, the constitution of “the people” is oft en a source of contention in any political community. That is also the case—even more so, perhaps—when it comes to “empowering” them. Intuitively, the term is relatively straightforward, and it is central to any conception of democratic governance as popular sovereignty. In practice, however, the term can be appropriated by a wide range of political subjectivities, with distinct modes of political mobilization, participation, and leadership. This malleability accounts for much of the conceptual confusion—and disagreement—that surrounds the concept of populism, and it explains why the populist label is routinely applied, oft en pejoratively, to seemingly disparate political phenomena.
Indeed, contemporary scholarly debates about the meaning and empirical extension of the populist concept oft en center precisely on this question of “power to the people” and the political subjectivities—that is, the patterns of identity construction, political mobilization, and popular participation—embodied therein. More specifically, debates center on the social and political construction of the popular subjects allegedly being empowered—in particular, whether these subjects can be self-constituted and mobilized “from below,” or whether populism refers more narrowly to the top-down mobilization, by dominant personalities, of diverse popular constituencies that lack a capacity for autonomous political expression. Clearly, either type of political mobilization can employ a populist discourse that claims to incorporate and empower “the people” in opposition to established elites. They embody, however, quite different logics of popular empowerment as a corrective to the representational deficiencies of existing political institutions, and they can spawn strikingly divergent political movements with varying implications for democratic governance.
To understand these different modes of political subjectivity, it is necessary to locate the study of populism squarely within the larger domain of political representation, where populism arises alongside, and oft en intersects with, other patterns of representation associated with political parties, civil society, and social movements. Indeed, populism is a specific type of response to crises of political representation, which can themselves take a number of different forms. It is a natural—though hardly an inevitable or exclusive—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. This chapter thus explores different types of representational crises and explains why they are prone to populist reactions—that is, to the articulation of claims, following diverse mobilizational logics, to give “power to the people.”
Discourse, Subjectivity, and Populist Mobilization
As Robert Jansen’s contribution to this volume clarifies, populism is a compound phenomenon that contains both mobilizational and discursive dimensions. A fair degree of scholarly consensus exists on the nature of populist discourse or rhetoric; indeed, the chapter by Rovira Kaltwasser persuasively argues that a minimalist conceptualization of populism centered on the ideological or discursive plane is most conducive to the comparative, and especially the cross-regional, study of the phenomenon. Some of the best recent scholarship follows this approach to identify the shared political logic of populism—namely, an ideological and discursive construction of the political order in terms of a binary elite-popular divide.1 As Margaret Canovan states, populism entails “an appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of the society.”2 The moralistic political discourse embedded in this binary construct condemns political, economic, and/or cultural elites who neglect, devalue, or exploit the “common people,” and it offers redemption to the latter by means of their political empowerment. At a minimum, such empowerment signifies a renovation in political leadership—that is, the replacement of established political elites with new leaders who are drawn from, or more effectively represent, the interests and values of “the people.” More expansively, political redemption and empowerment may entail promises to “refound” the political order on entirely new institutional bases—the motivating logic behind the election of constituent assemblies following the rise to power of antiestablishment leaders in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
In essence, then, populism invokes an appeal to popular sovereignty where political authority is widely deemed to be detached, unrepresentative, or unaccountable to the common people—the “authentic” denizens, or constituents, of the political community. The broad scholarly consensus around this minimal core of populism, however, begins to break down when the obvious question is asked: How is this popular sovereignty constructed and exercised by populist movements? This question brings to the forefront the mobilizational component of Jansen’s two-dimensional conceptualization, as populism without sociopolitical mobilization can be little more than empty rhetoric. Populism’s political power, along with its disruptive potential, is ultimately rooted in its ability to wed antielite and antiestablishment discursive appeals to the political mobilization of the excluded and the alienated—that is, to inspire popular subjects to rally, to protest, to strike, to blockade, to organize, and/or to vote.
The dilemma is that discursive appeals to popular sovereignty—to give power to the people—can be embedded in strikingly divergent types of political movements and mobilizational patterns. That, after all, is what allows a discursive conceptualization of populism to “travel” across time and space, wherever the minimalist rhetoric is found. Indeed, adding the stipulation that discourse be wedded to the mobilization of the marginalized does not greatly restrict the range of the populist concept, as it still allows for both top-down and bottom-up mobilizational patterns, or what Robert Barr labels “plebiscitary” and “participatory” types of linkages between mass constituencies and the leaders or movements that purport to empower them.3 Both types of linkages offer correctives to failed or ineffectual representation; indeed, they offer two quite different variants of direct democracy as an alternative to established representative institutions.
The corrective offered by participatory linkages is to enhance or replace existing institutions with “mechanisms by which citizens themselves” have a direct “role in government”—for example, by selecting party leaders, shaping party platforms, or sponsoring policy initiatives.4 Such mechanisms, it should be noted, can foster—or be instituted by—autonomous, horizontally organized collective subjects at the grassroots level, and they give such actors deliberative or even decision-making roles in public policymaking processes. In this corrective to representational failures, then, popular subjects are self-constituted, and “power to the people” is mobilized from below and exercised in a direct, even literal fashion.
By contrast, the corrective offered by plebiscitary linkages is to replace political incumbents—the political establishment or ruling caste, so to speak—with a new leadership that is a more authentic representative of the common people and is directly accountable to them, at least episodically, by means of popular acclamation (typically in the voting booth). Under plebiscitary linkages, policymaking authority is delegated to a leader who acts on behalf of the people,5 although this leader may on occasion submit specific initiatives to plebiscitary approval by means of popular referendums. The people, in theory at least, are empowered by virtue of their aggregate capacity to select a leader from outside the establishment, but they do not define or construct the political alternatives; such initiative resides outside and above their ranks, and popular subjects are vertically constructed around the figure of the leader. Rather than being self-constituted, they are mobilized from above.
To be sure, both plebiscitary and participatory linkages can be used to mobilize popular constituencies that were previously excluded, marginalized, or alienated. Likewise, both can employ an antielite, antiestablishment populist discourse that promises to give power to the people. Consequently, many scholars incorporate both types of mobilization within their conception of populism. Such an approach makes it possible to identify common, minimal properties within a wide range of mass movements that construct a binary elite/popular cleavage in a political community. So conceived, the populist category can incorporate grassroots, bottom-up forms of social mobilization such as the highly participatory agrarian cooperative movement of the U.S. South and Midwest in the late nineteenth century or the more recent political movement—crystallized in the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) of Evo Morales—that grew out of the confluence of mass protests involving coca growers, indigenous community organizations, and labor unions in Bolivia. Raúl Madrid, for example, has characterized the Bolivian case as an example of “ethnopopulism,” in which ethnic-based parties adopt inclusive electoral strategies that “fuse traditional populist constituencies—politically disenchanted urban mestizos with nationalist and statist views—to their rural, largely indigenous base.”6 A minimalist approach, however, can also identify populist traits—primarily discursive—in right-wing nationalist parties in Europe that challenge more cosmopolitan Eurocentric elites,7 as well as the top-down patterns of electoral and plebiscitary mobilization practiced by dominant Latin American leaders as diverse as Juan Perón, Alberto Fujimori, and Hugo Chávez.
The advantage of the minimalist approach, then, is that it “travels” well to different settings and identifies common discursive properties in diverse forms of popular mobilization. This capacity to travel, however, also poses a boundary problem, in that it can blur the distinctions between populism and other forms of social and political mobilization. Many social movements, for example, employ antielite and antiestablishment discourses, as do historic labor-based leftist parties, yet these are rarely situated by scholars in the populist domain. Indeed, the modern study of populism as a political phenomenon emerged among Latin American scholars precisely in order to differentiate the region’s populist mode of mass political incorporation from European patterns of class-based socialist incorporation.8 Although this differentiation involved ideological questions, it rested more fundamentally on divergent mobilizational patterns—namely, the distinction between political projects anchored in self-constituted, class-based organizations and those that construct popular subjects from above around the figure of a dominant leader. Crucially, the latter pattern was understood to prevail in Latin America due to the limited size and political strength of class-based actors, which impeded the construction of an autonomous political project such as that found in Europe’s working-class socialism. Populism, then, emerged as Latin America’s surrogate for socialism, with charismatic leadership welding together socially diverse and oft en poorly organized mass constituencies that otherwise lacked a capacity for autonomous political expression.
Perhaps for this reason, scholars influenced by the Latin American tradition are sometimes loathe to apply the populist label to autonomous, bottom-up patterns of sociopolitical mobilization, even where they employ discursive strategies that are reminiscent of populism. Barr,9 for example, explicitly restricts the populist label to mobilizational patterns that rely on plebiscitary rather than participatory linkage mechanisms. In so doing, he provocatively relegates nineteenth-century agrarian movements in the United States to the non-populist category, thus defying scholarly conventions that characterize them as populist. Kurt Weyland, likewise, makes plebiscitary authority a centerpiece of his conceptualization of populism,10 and for that reason casts doubt on the notion that populism can ever give power to the people; as he puts it, “populism does not empower ‘the people,’ but invokes the people to empower a leader.”11 Following the same logic, Roberts, reflecting on the powerful social movements that toppled two Bolivian presidents, built the MAS, and elected Evo Morales to the presidency, goes so far as to claim that they represent “the very antithesis of populism.”12
The point here is not to adjudicate between these different scholarly conventions, which ultimately rest not merely on nuanced differences in conceptualization, but rather on legitimate disagreements as to whether the essential core of populism is a discursive contestation of established elites or the appropriation of popular subjectivity by antiestablishment autocrats. Besides, political realities on the ground are oft en too muddled to sustain such fine-grained distinctions and the ideal-typical models that undergird them. Hugo Chávez, for example—a quintessential plebiscitary leader—also opened a plethora of grassroots participatory channels that allowed his constituents to manage communal affairs,13 while the social mobilization from below that ushered Evo Morales into power has also been employed in a plebiscitary manner to refound Bolivia’s constitutional order. Plebiscitary and participatory linkages, therefore, are not mutually exclusive, and they may be fused together in political projects that employ a diverse tool kit to give “power to the people.”
What matters, however, is to recognize that popular mobilization behind an antielite discourse can take a number of strikingly different forms, and these have major implications for the political subjectivity—and the putative empowerment—of mass constituencies. Whether or not they share the populist label, popular subjects that are relatively autonomous, self-constituted, and mobilized from below have different political and organizational resources than those that are stitched together around the figure of a dominant personality. The ability of the former to penetrate state institutions, shape and contest public policies, and hold leaders accountable is surely greater than that of the latter. This has been made abundantly clear in Bolivia, where Evo Morales—unlike Hugo Chávez—has been repeatedly challenged not only by elite opponents, but also by organized popular constituencies that retain a substantial capacity for autonomous political expression.
These different patterns of mobilization also have theoretical significance for explaining the rise of populism. Indeed, diametrically opposed theoretical expectations about the impact of civil society on populism can readily be drawn from the alternative approaches outlined above. If populism requires the predominance of plebiscitary linkages, then strong, densely organized civil societies would be expected to diminish the likelihood or success of populist mobilization.14 The reasoning is straightforward: the greater the level of autonomous, self-constituted organization from below, the more difficult it is for any political leader to appropriate popular subjectivity from above for a personalist project. Plebiscitary linkages are more likely where society is atomized but alienated, and thus dependent on a leader with special gifts to forge a common political project out of fragmented antiestablishment sentiments; intermediary institutions only distort or diffuse the relationship between such populist leadership and its mass constituencies. Participatory linkages, on the other hand, may well be demanded or constructed by civic associations that are well-organized but antiestablishment. Consequently, if such linkages are admissible to the populist domain, a strong civil society may be an accelerator of—rather than a safeguard against—populist mobilization.
Whether top-down or bottom-up, popular mobilization against established elites is not an everyday occurrence. Populism may be a permanent temptation where democracy (or at least mass politics) exists, but it thrives only where established institutions are incapable of marshalling the loyalties of substantial numbers of citizens. For this reason, populism is oft en thought to be associated with a crisis of political representation. As discussed below, however, crises of representation can take a number of different forms, and they elicit diverse populist reactions.
Populism and Crises of Political Representation
Although it is not impossible for populist leadership to emerge within an established political party, the antiestablishment character of populist discourse makes it far more likely to be located outside and against established parties than inside them. Populist mobilization, therefore, is quintessentially outsider politics; it cannot occur, on a large scale at least, unless a sizable number of voters (or potential voters) are alienated or detached from established parties and political elites. Such mobilization is a sure sign of failed or ineffectual political representation—a crisis, so to speak, in the transmission of societal interests, values, and preferences to the policymaking arena by parties and other intermediary organizations.
Like populist mobilization, however, crises of representation can come in a number of different forms. Voters (or potential voters) may become detached or alienated from established parties under at least three different political scenarios, each of which corresponds to a particular type of representational crisis. The first scenario is one of initial mass political incorporation, when a large number of citizens without partisan loyalties are being enfranchised for the first time, obtaining new citizenship rights, and becoming a target of mobilizational appeals. Although some of those appeals may derive from established parties, such parties oft en find it difficult to mobilize constituencies that they have long neglected. Consequently, new, “outsider” parties or populist figures may have a comparative advantage in sponsoring the initial political mobilization and incorporation of historically marginalized social groups. In such a context, populism emerges as a response to a crisis of restricted representation or, quite simply, political exclusion. By definition, excluded or marginalized groups are detached from established parties and, if awarded suffrage and citizenship rights, are available for political mobilization by antiestablishment figures.
This type of representational crisis was associated with the first great cycle of populism in Latin America in the early to mid-twentieth century, when oligarchic political domination gave way to a new phase of mass politics as urbanization and industrialization transformed the social landscape. In a few countries, such as Uruguay and Colombia, emerging working and middle classes were politically incorporated by traditional oligarchic parties, precluding the rise of both populist and leftist rivals. In most of the region, however, new labor-based populist parties and political movements arose outside and in opposition to the oligarchic political establishment, reconfiguring party systems around an elite/popular sociopolitical cleavage. These movements were oft en welded together behind the charismatic leadership of legendary populist figures like Perón in Argentina, Cárdenas in Mexico, Vargas in Brazil, and Haya de la Torre in Peru.15 In more recent times, populism has emerged during the early stages of mass political incorporation in other regions where political democracy is just getting established after extended periods of authoritarian rule. Such is the case, for example, of the populist movement behind Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, the mobilization of the urban poor in Africa, and the emergence of several prominent populist figures in Eastern Europe following the collapse of Communism.16
Initial political incorporation, of course, happens only once. If populism emerges only in such settings, we could expect populist tendencies to diminish once new democracies have consolidated and electorates have been fully enfranchised and politically incorporated. Over time, voters are expected to develop “name-brand loyalties” that bind them to specific parties, with affective ties and collective identities that are socialized around clientelist relationships, programmatic commitments, or social group membership. Where this occurs, voting behavior becomes habituated, outsiders get transformed into insiders, and rival parties “close off” the political marketplace to new competitors and populist outsiders. The larger the number of voters with fixed partisan identities, the fewer who are electorally “mobile” and susceptible to political mobilization by antiestablishment figures.17
Such habituation, however, is neither automatic nor inevitable, as some party systems remain fluid and inchoate. Inchoate party systems are weakly institutionalized and lack deep roots in society.18 They oft en do not have a stable organizational composition, as parties come and go, offering voters a varying menu of supply-side options from one election to the next. Neither do they have a stable balance of electoral competition; volatile shifts in vote shares occur among parties from one election cycle to another. In short, voters lack fixed partisan identities, and are thus electorally mobile. This mobility allows them not only to switch their support from one party to another across election cycles, but also to vote for in dependent figures and outsiders who challenge the establishment. A second scenario for populism, then, is when voters are not necessarily new—that is, in the initial stages of political incorporation—but simply unattached and electorally mobile.
Under this second scenario, populism does not respond to a crisis of restricted or exclusive representation, but rather responds to a crisis of weak or poorly institutionalized representation. Although this scenario can emerge in relatively new democracies where party systems have yet to congeal, it can also be found in more established democracies where party systems have broken down or simply failed to institutionalize stable partisan identities and competitive alignments. In such deinstitutionalized settings, both political representation and political competition tend to become highly personalized; voters support and identify with leaders rather than party organizations or platforms, and the axes of electoral competition are likewise drawn between rival personalities who claim to better represent the true interests of “the people.” Taken to the extreme, such deinstitutionalization can lead to forms of “serial populism,” or a political cycling of mass support from one in dependent personality to another. Although these figures may vary in their level of antiestablishment discourse and appeal, they typically use their in dependence from party organizations as a badge of authenticity to signal their proximity to, and their identification with, the common people. The most prominent examples of serial populism, perhaps, are contemporary Peru and Ecuador, where the demise of traditional party systems left a legacy of deinstitutionalized competition between fluid sets of in dependent personalities and populist outsiders.19
A third scenario for the rise of populism turns the second upside down. Voters are not detached from parties because they are weak; instead, they turn against parties because they are so strong and domineering. Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s concept of “cartel parties” captures the phenomenon well, as does the populist outsider critique of partidocracia (partyarchy).20 Cartel parties collude in sharing public office and resources, and they exploit both to entrench themselves in power. They depend on state institutions and become so thoroughly intertwined with them that their societal roots may wither; indeed, parties may come to be seen as alien forces that are set apart from the constituencies they purport to represent, save for their select and largely discredited clientele networks. In such contexts, parties can appear to form a closed, self-interested, and self-reproducing governing caste that is insulated from popular needs and concerns.
The crisis of representation to which this scenario corresponds is a lack of responsiveness or accountability. Citizens are not formally excluded from politics, since they do have the opportunity to exercise suffrage rights, but they find such rights effectively curtailed by the monopolization of the electoral arena and governing institutions by a collusive set of established actors. Under some conditions, however, this type of representational crisis is prone to the mobilization of the alienated and discontented—from above, by populist outsiders, or from below, by social protest movements. Examples of the latter pattern include the student protest movement that has rocked Chile’s party-dominated political establishment since 2011, or the explosion of mass protests that greeted Argentina’s financial meltdown in 2001–2002 and coined the enduring, antiestablishment slogan “Que se vayan todos” (loosely, “Let them all go”). Classic examples of the former, top-down pattern include the rise of Silvio Berlusconi following the collapse of the Italian party system in the mid-1990s and the populist eruption that allowed Hugo Chávez to bury Venezuela’s deeply entrenched two-party system in the late 1990s. To justify his plebiscitary commitment to a constituent assembly to refound Venezuela’s democratic regime, Chávez heaped scorn not only on the ruling partidocracia, but also on the entire post-1958 political order that the parties dominated; in his closing campaign speech before his landslide 1998 presidential election, he declared, “The rotten elites of the parties are boxed in, and they will soon be consigned to the trashbin of history.”21 Once these elites were swept aside, the path would be cleared for new and more authentic popular subjects to exercise their political voice; as Chávez states, “we are a revolutionary movement, a popular movement in favor of the cause of the dominated of this country and of this planet, in favor of justice, of the revolution.”22
Why is it, however, that some party systems remain highly stable and immune from such antiestablishment eruptions, whereas others crumble in their wake? These three different types of representational crises suggest that explanations of populism and other movements that pledge to give “power to the people” cannot be divorced from the study of party systems and more institutionalized forms of political representation. As explained below, the recent Latin American experience is conducive to a comparative analysis of the conditions and alignments that allow party systems to effectively channel societal claims, as well as those that leave them vulnerable to antisystemic forms of sociopolitical mobilization.
Parties, Popular Mobilization, and Latin America’s “Second Incorporation”
Following a period of widespread military authoritarianism in the 1960s and 1970s—in part, a conservative backlash against labor and popular mobilization in the middle of the century—Latin America experienced a wave of democratic transitions in the 1980s that transformed the region’s political landscape. The restoration of civic and political rights, however, was often accompanied by an erosion of social citizenship rights that were the fruit of popular struggles during the initial period of mass political incorporation in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, democratization in the 1980s coincided with a debt-fueled collapse of state-led development models and an unprecedented region-wide economic crisis that led to a decade of lost growth, acute inflationary pressures, declining real wages, and rising inequalities. Market-based austerity and structural adjustment programs finally brought hyperinflation under control by the middle of the 1990s, but stabilization came with high social costs, including a dramatic weakening of organized labor, an informalization of the workforce, and a porous social safety net that had been punctured by spending cuts and the privatization of public ser vices and utilities.
By the late 1990s, however, the political winds had begun to shift once again, putting the “neoliberal” economic model on the defensive. Popular movements were revived in a number of countries, and an unprecedented political shift to the Left occurred, with twelve countries electing left-of-center presidents between 1998 and 2014. A commodity export boom after 2003 relaxed fiscal and foreign exchange constraints, providing national governments with greater latitude to increase wages, strengthen the social safety net, and address the social deficits of the neoliberal model. In this context, observers began to speak of a second historical phase of mass political in-corporation, with democratic regimes demonstrating a newfound capacity to respond to popular demands and expand social citizenship rights.23
The politics of this second incorporation period varied dramatically across countries, however, even among those that participated in the so-called “left turn.” In some countries, mass incorporation and the political shift to the Left involved popular rebellions against traditional parties and the political establishment—in short, patterns of social and political mobilization that pledged to give “power to the people” and, in several prominent cases, refound the constitutional order. In others, however, the political shift to the Left occurred within the political establishment itself, by means of an institutionalized alternation in public office that empowered established parties of the Left.
This variation is not attributable to the political strength or institutionalization of traditional party systems. Neither did it depend on the depth of neoliberal reform or the performance record of liberalized economies. Although these factors undoubtedly played a role in individual cases, they did not systematically differentiate institutionalized “left turns” from those that eclipsed traditional parties and empowered populist outsiders or new political movements. Instead, political alignments during the “critical juncture” of market liberalization heavily conditioned the role of popular movements and established parties in the post-adjustment process of mass reincorporation.24
The most important popular movements to “empower the people” were concentrated in countries where market reforms were imposed in a “bait-and-switch” manner—that is, by governments led by established center-left or populist parties that had campaigned on anti-neoliberal platforms, only to change course after taking office. Where this occurred, partisan competition was programmatically de-aligned, and party systems were left without an institutionalized channel for the articulation of societal dissent from the market liberalization process. Such dissent was channeled, instead, into anti-system forms of mass social protest. The most widespread and explosive protest cycles in the recent Latin American experience—those that directly or indirectly drove pro-market presidents from office—all occurred in countries that experienced such programmatically de-aligning, bait-and-switch patterns of market reform. These included the mass urban riots known as the caracazo in Venezuela in 1989, which severely weakened the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez and contributed to his eventual impeachment; the series of indigenous and popular protests that helped topple three consecutive elected presidents in Ecuador between 1997 and 2005; the piquetero (picketers) movement and mass uprising that forced the resignation of Fernando de la Rua in Argentina in 2001; and the indigenous and popular mobilizations behind the so-called “water wars” and “gas wars” that eventually toppled Bolivian presidents in 2003 and 2005.25
These protest cycles wreaked havoc on national party systems that provided no effective institutional outlet for dissent from the “Washington Consensus” around market liberalization in the 1990s. In Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, traditional party systems were thoroughly eclipsed by new leftist alternatives that sponsored the reincorporation of popular constituencies. In Venezuela and Ecuador, these new alternatives were classic populist outsiders—Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa, respectively—who did not arise from the protest movements themselves, but offered plebiscitary leadership that both fanned and capitalized on the popular backlash against the political establishment and its neoliberal model. In Bolivia, the leftist alternative was directly spawned by the indigenous and popular movements that protested against the neoliberal model, built a new “movement party” (the MAS), and elected Evo Morales to the presidency in 2005.
In these three countries, the leftist alternatives that promised to give “power to the people”—in Correa’s discourse, by means of a “citizens’ revolution”—were not content merely to win elections and capture executive office within the institutional confines of the existing political order. Instead, presidential victories were “constituent moments” wherein “the people” claimed the right to reimagine and reconfigure democratic institutions from scratch.26 Backed by overwhelming popular majorities, and confronting highly fragmented and discredited political oppositions, Chávez, Correa, and Morales quickly bypassed opposition-controlled legislative and judicial bodies to convoke popular referendums on the election of constituent assemblies. They opened channels for non-elite social actors to participate in these assemblies, then employed popular referendums to install the new constitutional orders that they designed. Power to the people, therefore, entailed the direct, plebiscitary exercise of popular sovereignty as a constitutive force, producing a rupture with inherited regime institutions and the construction of a new political order by previously marginalized or excluded sectors.
Among the four cases with formidable mass protest movements, only in Argentina did an established party—the Peronist Partido Justicialista (PJ)—largely succeed in channeling, or at least containing, the popular backlash against the neoliberal model. Alone among the cases of bait-and-switch reform, the PJ led the process of market liberalization in Argentina after 1989, survived the backlash against it that occurred under the watch of its rivals, and returned to the helm as the country veered to the Left after the financial debacle of 2001–2002. Although the protest chant “Que se vayan todos” evoked a rejection of the entire political establishment, the anti-Peronist side of the party system ultimately bore the brunt of the political costs of the Argentine crisis. Ironically, the same Peronist party that sponsored the original process of labor and popular incorporation in the middle of the twentieth century and then dismantled its legacies during the neoliberal interregnum of the 1990s, eventually oversaw the second historical incorporation process under the governments of Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner after 2003.
The aftermath to market reform has been less turbulent, however—and far less susceptible to antiestablishment forms of social and political mobilization—where structural adjustment policies were adopted by conservative political actors and consistently opposed by institutionalized parties of the Left. In Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, conservative parties or military dictators imposed market reforms over the staunch opposition of major leftist parties—the Socialists in Chile, Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) in Brazil, and Frente Amplio (FA) in Uruguay. These leftist parties aligned party systems programmatically and provided institutionalized channels for dissent from neoliberal orthodoxy, even as they moderated their programmatic stands and backed away from historic socialist commitments in the 1990s. All three parties progressively strengthened in the post-adjustment era, eventually electing presidents between 2000 and 2004. In none of these cases, however, did the Left ride a wave of social protest into office. Indeed, these countries did not experience anything like the social explosions that toppled presidents in the aforementioned bait-and-switch cases.
In these three countries, established party systems remained intact, and major conservative opposition parties imposed institutional checks and balances on new leftist presidents. These presidents, therefore, operated within the institutional confines of established regimes; they did not try to invoke “the people” to exercise popular sovereignty through plebiscitary means or re-found the constitutional order. In fact, as Kirk Hawkins shows in his comparative analysis of populist discourse, these presidents made little attempt to invoke “the people” at all. Ricardo Lagos and Michele Bachelet in Chile, Lula in Brazil, and Tabaré Vásquez and José Mujica in Uruguay—along with Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández in Argentina—ranked very low on Hawkins’s measurement of populist discourse based on presidential speeches. By contrast, Chávez, Correa, and Morales (along with Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua) recorded the highest scores in the region.27 With the exception of Nicaragua, then, populist discourse was concentrated primarily in countries where political leaders from outside the party establishment had taken power and mobilized popular constituencies behind projects to refound the constitutional order. This dynamic was found primarily in countries that experienced bait-and-switch patterns of market reform and explosive social protest cycles against party systems that failed to provide institutional channels for dissent from neoliberal orthodoxy.
This experience thus suggests that Latin America’s second historical phase of mass political incorporation, like its first, was conducive to the mobilization of claims to give “power to the people,” but only under specified conditions that were not found throughout the region. Like the early twentieth-century period of initial political incorporation, reincorporation at the dawn of the twenty-first century was sometimes associated with a crisis of representation that was rooted in the political exclusion or marginalization of popular sectors—in particular, those who opposed market orthodoxy and found no institutional channels within the party system to express their dissent. This exclusion was especially pronounced in countries where established center-left or populist parties adopted structural adjustment policies in a bait-and-switch manner. Indeed, where this occurred, the aforementioned representational crises of political exclusion and unaccountable representation converged in a volatile mixture of mass social protest, partial or complete party system collapse, and popular mobilization behind antiestablishment leaders or new “movement parties.” These representational crises were attenuated, however, where conservative-led market reforms aligned party systems programmatically, and established leftist parties provided institutional outlets for popular dissent from neoliberal orthodoxy. In these settings, reincorporation was sponsored by traditional parties of the Left that addressed the social deficits of the neoliberal model within the institutional confines of established democratic regimes—notably, with little or no effort to mobilize popular sectors behind claims to give “power to the people.”
Whether claims to give “power to the people” are mobilized from the top-down or the bottom-up, their resonance is inevitably conditioned by the capacity of established institutions to politically incorporate and provide effective representation to diverse popular constituencies. The study of populism, therefore, should be embedded in the larger field of political representation, where it intersects with the analysis of political parties, civil society, and social movements. As the recent Latin American experience suggests, antiestablishment popular movements are most likely to thrive not merely where party systems are weak, but where they are exclusive and unaccountable to a broad range of societal interests. In particular, party systems that fail to provide meaningful programmatic competition on salient public policy dimensions that divide the body politic are highly susceptible to diverse forms of popular backlash. Where the technocratic consensus behind market liberalization policies in the 1990s stripped partisan competition of its programmatic content, party systems were pummeled in the post-adjustment period by mass social protest and the rise of antiestablishment electoral alternatives. Far from an exercise in political voluntarism, then, populism is a response to multifaceted crises of political representation that have identifiable institutional correlates.
Notes
1. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); Kirk Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); and Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, “Populism and (Liberal) Democracy: A Framework for Analysis,” in Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds., Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective to Democracy? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
2. Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People: Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 3.
3. Robert Barr, “Populists, Outsiders, and Anti-Establishment Politics,” Party Politics 15, no. 1 (2009): 29–48.
4. Ibid., 35.
5. Ibid., 36.
6. Raúl L. Madrid, “The Rise of Ethnopopulism in Bolivia,” World Politics 60, no. 3 (April 2008): 481.
7. Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8. For classic early works on Latin American populism, see Torcuato S. di Tella, “Populism and Reform in Latin America,” in Claudio Véliz, ed., Obstacles to Change in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1978); and Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: Verso, 1977).
9. Barr, “Populists, Outsiders, and Anti-Establishment Politics,” 38.
10. Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics,” Comparative Politics 34, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
11. Personal communication with the author, January 15, 2012.
12. Kenneth M. Roberts, “Latin America’s Populist Revival,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 27, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 2007): 14.
13. Kirk Hawkins, “Who Mobilizes? Participatory Democracy in Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution,” Latin American Politics and Society 52, no. 3 (2010): 31–66.
14. See Philip Oxhorn, Sustaining Civil Society: Economic Change, Democracy, and the Social Construction of Citizenship in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
15. See Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 1991), and Michael L. Conniff, ed., Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
16. See, for example, Kevin Hewison, “Thaksin Shinawatra and the Reshaping of Thai Politics,” Contemporary Politics 16, no. 2 (June 2010): 119–33; Danielle Resnick, “Opposition Parties and the Urban Poor in African Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 45, no. 11 (November 2012): 1351–78; and Seán Hanley, “The Czeck Republicans 1990–1998: A Populist Outsider in a Consolidating Democracy,” in Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism in Europe and the Americas, 68–87.
17. Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability: The Stabilisation of European Electorates 1885–1985 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
18. See Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
19. On Ecuador, see de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America. Steven Levitsky discusses Peru in “Peru: Challenges of a Democracy without Parties,” unpublished manuscript.
20. See Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party,” Party Politics 1, no. 1 (1995): 5–31, and Michael Coppedge, Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).
21. Cited in Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective, 61–62.
22. Interview with Agustin Blanco Muñoz, Habla el Comandante, 3rd ed. (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1998), 355.
23. See Kenneth M. Roberts, “The Mobilization of Opposition to Economic Liberalization,” in Margaret Levi, Simon Jackman, and Nancy Rosenblum, eds., Annual Review of Political Science 11 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews, 2008), 327–49, and Juan Pablo Luna and Fernando Filgueira, “The Left Turns as Multiple Paradigmatic Crises,” Third World Quarterly 30, no. 2 (March 2009): 371–95.
24. Kenneth M. Roberts, “Market Reform, Programmatic (De-)Alignment, and Party System Stability in Latin America,” Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 11 (November 2013): 1422–52.
25. See Eduardo Silva, Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Major episodes of bait-and-switch reform occurred under Acción Democrática (AD) in Venezuela, the Peronist Partido Justicialista (PJ) in Argentina, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) in Bolivia, and Izquierda Democrática (ID) and Partido Roldosista Ecuatoriano (PRE) in Ecuador.
26. See Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
27. See Kirk Hawkins, “Is Chávez Populist? Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 8 (2009): 1040–67, and Kirk Hawkins, “Populism and Democracy in Latin America: New Data for Old Questions,” paper presented at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Francisco, May 23–26, 2012.