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Preface to the Second Edition

Since the publication of Populist Seduction in Latin America in 2000 there has been a renaissance of scholarship on populism.¹ The term has also traveled from academia to the media and policy circuits. Populism currently is used to describe the left-wing and nationalist governments of Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales, which claim their legitimacy through winning elections, but which also follow certain authoritarian practices. Critics have charged these regimes with not respecting the separation of powers, the rule of law, the rights of the opposition, or the independence of the media. Critics also claim that their ultranationalist and statist economic policies cannot last and are viable only because of the current high prices of mineral resources. In these rentier states, for example, oil accounts for 75 percent of Venezuela’s exports and for 64 percent of Ecuador’s; in Bolivia natural gas accounts for 52 percent of all exports (Weyland 2009, 151). Contrary to these pessimistic and sobering assessments, Chávez, Correa, and Morales claim to be leading post-neoliberal regimes that have enhanced rights and that are experimenting with new forms of democratic politics. Their supporters consider these regimes as creative experiments of hope that can show to the left in the West the possibility for novel post-neoliberal social and economic policies. These experiments, they argue, can rejuvenate and reinvigorate democracy.

These contradictory assessments about the state of democracy in Latin America, and about its relationship with populism, are based on how the word democracy has been understood through three democratizing traditions. The first is the liberal-republican democratic tradition, with its emphasis on individual freedoms, pluralism, procedural politics, accountability, and institutional designs aimed at maintaining checks and balances between the different branches of government. The second tradition, rooted in Marxism, emphasizes social justice and has advocated direct forms of democratic representation and participation in pyramidal citizen councils where delegates can be recalled (Held 1987, 105–39). Populism represents the third democratizing tradition. Populist leaders have constructed politics as an ethical and moral confrontation between the people and the oligarchy. They have sought direct forms of representation and have understood democracy as the occupation of public spaces in the name of a leader constructed as the symbolic representation of the excluded populace.

These three traditions have worked as ideologies that appeal both to logic and to passion. They depict what democracy ought to be and have been used as political myths that have mobilized and inspired people to participate in politics. Even though many scholars argue that the liberal-republican model can accommodate many of the demands of the other traditions, others, drawing on Marxism and populism, claim that it does not allow for the direct expression of popular sovereignty or for genuine democratic representation. Radical substantive models have been presented as alternatives that can fulfill the unmet expectations of genuine participation and decision making in the affairs of the collectivity. Populists and Marxists advocate for direct forms of participation and representation of the people’s sovereignty. Contrary to liberals, who argue that in a differentiated society with a plurality of interests, the will of the people cannot be conceived as one and homogeneous, populists and Marxists have understood the people as having one will (Abts and Rummens 2007; Lefort 1986). Populists and Marxists also contrast a politics of the will, where crowds directly express their sovereignty, to the legal procedures, mediations, and compromises of liberal politics. Marxists and populists share Schmittian understandings of politics as a struggle between enemies (see Schmitt 2007). The interests of the people are as potentially antagonistic to those of the oligarchy as the interests of the proletariat are to the interests of the bourgeoisie.

This book explores the tensions between these democratic traditions. It aims to depart from essentialist and ideological defenses or condemnations of populism and to explore their ambiguous relationship with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is built on the uneasy coexistence of a liberal constitutionalist emphasis on pluralism and individual rights with democratic demands for equality and for people’s sovereignty (Mouffe 2005a, 52–53). “Democratic systems are characterized by an intrinsic tension between the power of the people on the one hand (the popular/populist will), and, on the other, the constitutionalist provisions which protect citizens from the power of government, and from the arbitrary exercise of power” (Mény and Surel 2002a, 7).

Latin American populists have appealed to the principles of equality and sovereignty. Historically they have given priority to social and political rights at the cost of civil rights. Understanding sovereignty as a function of free and open elections, populists have also expanded the franchise, incorporating previously excluded groups (Peruzzotti 2008). But populists have not valued the liberal traditions of civil rights and pluralism. Populists’ lack of regard for political liberalism can be explained by the fact that, unlike the contractual bases of authority based on the individual, they have advocated for organic and holistic conceptions of community (Zanatta 2008). These views allow populist leaders to claim to embody the voices of undifferentiated communities that share the same identities and interests. Even though populists have searched for alternatives to liberal democracy, they have not totally abandoned all the instruments of representative democracy. “Populism rejects parties but usually organizes itself as a political movement; it is highly critical of political elites, but runs for elections; it advocates the power of the people, yet relies on seduction by a charismatic leader” (Mény and Surel 2002a, 17).

The tensions between pluralism and civil rights on the one hand and sovereignty and equality on the other can be further explored as the conflict between what Margaret Canovan (1999, 2005) has argued are the two phases of democracy.

From a pragmatic point of view, corresponding to the ordinary, everyday diversity of people-as-population, modern democracy is a complex set of institutions that allow us to coexist with other people and their divergent interests with as little coercion as possible. But democracy is also a repository of one of the redemptive visions (characteristic of modernity) that promises salvation through politics. The promised savior is “the people,” a mysterious collectivity somehow composed of us, ordinary people, and yet capable of transfiguration into an authoritative entity that can make dramatic and redeeming political appearances. (2005, 89–90)

The inherent tension between these two phases of democracy explains why populism continues to reappear. Whenever citizens feel that politicians have appropriated their will, they can demand to get it back. Populism, however, does not have the same effects in different institutional settings. In institutionalized political systems, “populism can be read as a fever warning which signals that problems are not being dealt with effectively, or point to the malfunctioning of the linkages between citizens and governing elites” (Mény and Surel 2002a, 15). In poorly institutionalized systems, “populist fever” can run out of control, and may not necessarily lead to an improvement of democratic governance and accountability. “[Populism] is far more deleterious in newer democracies where the ‘rules of the game’ are more contested and constraints on populist actors are weaker: here populism’s association with charismatic leadership and organizational de-institutionalization has a natural tendency toward messianic leadership” (March 2007, 73).

As Margaret Canovan maintains, the term the people “is not only the source of political legitimacy, but can sometimes appear to redeem politics from oppression, corruption, and banality” (2005, 125). Populists distrust views of democracy as accommodation and compromise. Instead, they advocate democracy “as the politics of the will” (Canovan 2002, 34), where the people express their sovereignty directly and without intermediaries. Over the past ten years Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have experienced intense political mobilizations and insurrections carried out in the name of popular sovereignty and democracy. Supporters and opponents of Chávez have polarized Venezuela, using collective action as a means of expressing their views in the streets. In 2002 the military briefly ousted and then restored Chávez to power, arguing they were fulfilling the will of the masses marching both for and against the president (López 2005). Between 2000 and 2006 Bolivia experienced intense collective action and political instability. Scholars have debated whether or not that nation went through a revolutionary epoch (Dunkerley 2007; García Linera 2004; Hylton and Thomson 2007; Webber 2008). In Ecuador since 1996 three elected presidents have had their terms cut short by constitutional coups carried out under the excuse of implementing what the people had willed in the streets.

Many analysts have interpreted recent Andean rebellions as populist resurrections; “the people,” without intermediaries, took their political destinies into their own hands. Since the heyday of Latin American populism, in the 1940s, when the excluded masses became incorporated into politics, democracy has been lived and experienced as the occupation of public spaces in the name of a leader exalted as the embodiment of poor people’s aspirations. In Argentina, workers’ demonstrations to rescue Gen. Juan Perón from military arrest in 1945 became enshrined as Loyalty Day and a part of Peronist myths and rituals (Torre 1995). José María Velasco Ibarra, five-time president of Ecuador, eloquently constructed the notion of democracy as the occupation of public spaces: “the streets and plazas are for citizens to express their aspirations and yearnings, not for slaves to rattle their chains” (de la Torre 1993, 160).

Populism is based on a Manichaean rhetoric of us versus them. In Latin America, this antagonism has been constructed as that of the people against the oligarchy. Under populism, all social, economic, and ethnic differentiations and oppressions fall into two irreconcilable poles: the people, who constitute both the nation and lo popular, versus the foreign-led oligarchy, which has illegally appropriated the will of the people. The notion of the popular incorporates the Marxist idea of class, understood as antagonistic conflict between two groups, with the romantic view of the purity of the people. As a result, the popular has been imagined as an undifferentiated, unified, and homogenous entity (Avritzer 2002, 72). Marxists share the populist emphasis on reducing the complexity of social struggles to a Manichaean struggle between two antagonistic camps. Both Marxist and populist traditions disdain liberal mediated politics, seeking instead for radical substantive democracy based on the direct enactment of sovereignty, and as direct representation. These two traditions, however, disagree as to the roles to be given to different actors. Whereas Marxists give normative and theoretical priority to the proletariat, populists search for the vaguer category the people. Given the similarities of the two traditions, it is not a surprise that a few Marxist academics, despite the bad reputation of the term populism, have searched for a combination of populism and socialism (Laclau 1977, 2005a, 2006; Raby 2006).

This new expanded and revised edition of Populist Seduction explores the tensions between democratization and charismatic-plebiscitarian leadership. It includes three new chapters. The first of these, “The Resurgence of Radical Populism in Latin America” (chapter 5), analyzes the regimes of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa. It explores not only the continuities of these regimes with existing populist cultural and discursive traditions but also their innovations. It focuses on Marxist and Indianist scholarly critiques of liberal democracy. It also explores the tensions between radical participatory democracy and charismatic leadership in the new institutions created in Venezuela to improve and transcend liberal forms. Chapter 5 explores different constructions of the category the people and the resulting levels of polarization in different populist experiences. It critiques the commonly held view of the politics of the informal sectors as disorganized masses and shows why the poor continue to endorse populist leaders.

The ambiguities of Rafael Correa’s project for a post-neoliberal citizens’ revolution are explored in chapter 6. It studies the 2006 presidential campaign in Ecuador, contrasting the rhetoric and style of Correa with that of Álvaro Noboa. It shows how traditional ways of campaigning have merged and have become hybridized with modern uses of television. The chapter analyzes Correa’s style of governing through permanent political campaigns and explores the contested meanings of democracy and the prospects of democratizing society under his administration.

This new edition also follows Abdalá Bucaram’s saga, from self-imposed exile in Panama in 1997 to his triumphant return to Guayaquil in 2005. Bucaram’s return to Ecuador in 2005 provoked different reactions, including the overthrow of President Lucio Gutiérrez, in April 2005. It helped further delegitimize political institutions and political parties and clear the path for the election of Rafael Correa, who ran as an outsider, promising to overhaul the country’s economic and political systems.

Finally, the conclusion, “Between Authoritarianism and Democracy,” outlines the challenges of radical populism for newly established democracies. This chapter explores the similarities and differences between what the literature describes as classical populism, neoliberal neopopulism, and radical left-wing populism. These populist experiences are examined in case studies of Ecuadorian politics that focus on José María Velasco Ibarra, Abdalá Bucaram, and Rafael Correa. The book also compares different Latin American experiences during these three surges of Latin American populism.

My understanding of populism follows recent work that has uncoupled politics from economics and that has departed from the views of populism as a phase in the history of Latin America linked to specific economic policies (Roberts 1995; Weyland 1996, 2001, 2003). Populist regimes have followed nationalist, Keynesian, and redistributive policies, as well as their opposites—neoliberal market economy policies. Unlike the market reform policies of Alberto Fujimori or Carlos Menem, the current wave of radical populists is following classical populist nationalist and redistributive principles nowadays branded as socialism of the twenty-first century (Weyland 2009).

Populism is better understood as a discourse that dichotomizes politics as a struggle between two irreconcilable and antagonistic camps: the people against the oligarchy. Under populism the name of a leader becomes an empty signifier that incorporates a series of unmet demands that cannot be processed within the existing institutional and hegemonic order (Laclau 2005a; Panizza 2008). Since populism is based on a rhetoric that pits the people against the oligarchy, the level of polarization and confrontation that populism entails has varied. Radical populists such as Hugo Chávez are politicizing existing inequalities and confronting society in political, socioeconomic, and ethnic terms (Roberts 2003). Chávez, Morales, and Correa use discourses that are similar to other national radical populists, such as Juan Perón, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and the young Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, whom the literature has labeled classical populists. The discourse of other leaders, such as Velasco and Fujimori, provoked political polarization but not the same level of class and ethnic confrontation as the aforementioned experiences.

Populism is also a strategy to get elected and to govern based on this Manichaean discourse. Populist leaders aim to have a direct, but not necessarily institutionalized, relationship with their followers. Populism is a strategy of top-down mobilization (Roberts 2008) that clashes with the autonomous demands of social movement organizations. Populist glorification of common people and their attacks on elites could open spaces for common people to press for their agendas and the redress of their grievances (Ellner 2005, 2008). The tension between top-down mobilization and autonomous mobilization from below is characteristic of populism.

Under populism new political and economic elites have replaced well-established elites. The so-called classical populist regimes allowed industrial elites to share power with or replace agrarian elites, or both. The replacement of elites is one of populism’s democratizing features (Weyland 2003). Even though populism as lived is profoundly democratic, it has simultaneously built a leader into the embodiment of an undifferentiated vox populi. Hence populists have simultaneously democratized their nations by expanding the franchise and by incorporating formerly excluded people, while leaders have been created as the personification of the people’s democratic aspirations and as the authorized interpreters of their will. Populism has created not only new social orders but novel social pacts. Populists have destroyed institutions while promising to build a new society from the ashes of the old regimes. Yet the new institutions and new rules sometimes clash with the authoritarian conception of leaders as being above procedures, norms, and institutions.

This book aims to understand the redeeming dimensions of populist politics, as well as the dangers of “fantasies of salvation” to pluralism and to civil and human rights (Tismaneanu 1998). It explores how populism is a recurrent feature in societies marked by deep structural inequalities and with weak institutional channels to process social conflicts. It explains how populist appeals work in contexts where people are economically and legally poor, and where discourses of democracy are used to silence and to exclude the poor and the nonwhite. Even though populism as lived is liberating and empowers the poor and the nonwhite as the essence of a nation, it continues to rely on plebiscitary acclamation and on the appropriation of the will of the people by charismatic saviors.

Several institutions and people helped me in preparing this new edition of Populist Seduction in Latin America. I thank Gillian Berchowitz at Ohio University Press for her continuous support. I wrote the new material for the book at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where I was a fellow during the 2008–9 academic year. The center gave me the time and a stimulating environment to work on this project. I thank the staff and scholars of the center for their support, in particular the Program for Latin American Studies and its director, Cynthia Arnson. I also thank Taylor Jardno for her help as research assistant at the Wilson Center. A version of chapter 5 was published in Constellations,² and I thank Andrew Arato and Martin Plotke for their comments and suggestions. Chapter 6 builds on my collaborative work with Catherine Conaghan, a friend and mentor who deeply influenced my work. I also thank my colleagues and students at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales Sede Ecuador (FLACSO-Ecuador) for their continuous engagement with my work and for their suggestions on how to improve my arguments. Julio Aibar, Enrique Peruzzotti, Mauro Porto, Kenneth Roberts, Kurt Weyland, and Loris Zanatta have commented on my work. Finally, Carmen Martínez has always been there for me, challenging my ideas and supporting my endeavors.