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
