The populist ambivalence. Presidents and democracy in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore the conditions under which populist presidents undermine, preserve or improve democracy, with evidence from Latin America. We address five varieties of democracy in the region (electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian) from 1994 to 2019 in 18 countries and focus on the backsliding or its absence during each presidential term. To do so, we rely on a QCA approach, through which we interpret the changes on each variety, acknowledging the presence/absence of populist presidents, presidents’ popularity, political and economic critical junctures, support for democracy, an institutionalised party system and political stability. Results show an ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy as highlighted by part of the literature. Although populism emerges as an almost necessary condition for democratic backsliding in any variety, there are several cases where the presence of populist presidents led to an improvement of democracy in the different aspects analysed.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• democracy
• V-Dem
• QCA
• Latin America

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We chose ‘democratic backsliding’ instead of other concepts such as ‘autocratization’ because it is not limited to electoral democracy (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019, p. 1096) and it is also a broad term that can ‘constitute democratic breakdown or simply the serious weakening of existing democratic institutions for undefined ends’ (Bermeo, 2016, p. 6).

2 We are fully aware of the temporal variance and time-sensitivity of the outcome condition; still, since the cases are presidencies and not presidents themselves, we believe by implementing a crisp-set QCA the time variance can be addressed, because in the sufficiency analyses, we can identify individual presidents in different presidencies and different varieties of democracy.

3 We tried alternative calibrations of the conditions, and results do not significantly differ from those displayed in the article.

4 Do not confuse the last name of the presidents with the last name of authors cited in the text.

5 Coverage represents the proportion of cases that have documented outcomes and are included in the configuration; the higher the coverage, the higher the proportion of outcomes explained (i.e., covered) by the configurations and the solution (group of configurations). Consistency measures the proportion of cases that belong to the configuration or solution, and in fact do have the outcome; the higher the consistency, the more explanatory power (i.e. consistency) the configuration/solution has. In our case, consistency is always 1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José Manuel Rivas

José Manuel Rivas is an assistant professor at the University of Salamanca. He received a Ph.D. in political science from University of Salamanca. His research lines are political leadership, elites, representation and conflict resolution.

Asbel Bohigues

Asbel Bohigues is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Valencia. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Salamanca. He is also the assistant editor of the journals América Latina Hoy and Revista Latinoamericana de Opinión Pública. His research lines include comparative politics, democracy and elites, with a regional specialisation in Latin America.

Rodolfo E. Colalongo

Rodolfo E. Colalongo, a Ph.D. in Sociology, Theory, and History of Political Institutions from the University of Salerno, Italy, is a lecturer at the Faculty of Finance, Government and International Relations and a researcher at the Center for Research and Special Projects – CIPE – on issues related to populism, democracy, foreign policy and international relations.