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ABSTRACT
This paper contributes to the current literature on the relationship between populist rule and liberal democracy by conducting quantitative research with a time-series cross-sectional dataset covering 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2017. The findings reveal an overall negative correlation between populist rule and the quality of liberal democratic institutions, highlighting their inherent incompatibility. Nevertheless, this paper argues that several factors influence the governing populists' ability to erode liberal democracy. Specifically, it is observed that the negative impact of populist rule on the quality of liberal democratic institutions is amplified in the presence of higher levels of natural resource rents and lower levels of industrial employment and financial development. Moreover, it is found that the impact of these moderating variables on the relationship between populist rule and liberal democracy is contingent upon the ideological orientation of governing populists.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This class structure is a distinctive feature characterising typical Latin American societies. The distinction between formal and informal workers derives from the centrality of the informal working class in the structuration of labour relations in Latin American countries. According to the most recent statistics on the informal economy by International Labor Organization (Citation2019), the share of informal employment including agriculture in total employment was 48% in Argentina in 2018, 81% in Bolivia in 2018, 45% in Brazil in 2015, 29% in Chile in 2019, 62% in Colombia in 2019, 39% in Costa Rica in 2019, 57% in the Dominican Republic in 2018, 74% in Ecuador in 2019, 69% in El Salvador in 2018, 80% in Guatemala in 2017, 83% in Honduras in 2017, 66% in Mexico in 2004, 82% in Nicaragua in 2012, 51% in Panama in 2018, 69% in Paraguay in 2019, 69% in Peru in 2018, 24% in Uruguay in 2019.
2 Although there exist informal jobs in the industrial sector, it still serves as a better proxy for the strength of organised labour than other measures such as labour union membership rates due to its data availability. Moreover, the proportion of informal employment in the formal sector should be similar across countries, giving a systematic error for statistical analysis.
3 Polity Score from the Polity V Project (Marshall et al., Citation2020) also measures the quality of some core components of liberal democracy such as executive constraints, in addition to the principles of electoral democracy. Nevertheless, I choose Liberal Democracy Index over Polity Score as the former measures the quality of liberal democratic regimes in a more explicit and disaggregated way. Furthermore, Liberal Democracy Index is less sticky than Polity Score over the study period, facilitating my regression analyses.
4 My empirical results in Section 4 are not driven by the choice to update the dataset.
5 During the 2002 presidential election, Uribe strenuously denounced government corruption and political intriguers, while constructing himself as someone not contaminated by the corrupt establishment (Burrier Citation2019; Dugas, Citation2003). He was also open about his resentment towards the existing political institutions.
6 Lugo’s 2008 presidential campaign delivered a message in populist accents featuring a simplistic polarisation of society. By making a clear distinction between the well-off and the poor, he denounced the established political system, promising that he would give power to ‘the people’. Along with one of his campaign slogans, ‘change or death’, it was advertised that he did not consider himself ‘a slave of the law’.
7 Maduro’s tie to Chavismo and ‘us versus them’ rhetoric that he inherited from his predecessor Hugo Chávez during his presidential campaign justifies the populist label.
8 The dataset lacks instances of a country-year under centrist populist rule. In columns (1) through (4) in , the dummy variable for centrist non-populist rule is used as the baseline category. The analysis considers the impact of different types of governments on the quality of liberal democracy, using centrist non-populist rule as the reference category.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Seungho Lee
Seungho Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Jeonbuk National University. His research interests include Latin American political economy, international trade, and East Asia–Latin America relations.