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.
