Populism, Campaign Effects, and the Mobilization of Populist Voters in Mexico

• In Event: Anti-Corruption Politics and Reactionary Populism

Abstract

Despite growing interest in and research on populism, we have little knowledge about why voters support populist forces, particularly in new democracies in Latin America. Drawing on the ideational definition of populism we advance a theory of populist voting by focusing on voters’ grievances and the activation of populist attitudes by strategic politicians in Mexico. We also compare our results with recent elections in Europe (e.g. Greece and Ireland) and Latin America (e.g. Brazil).

The Mexican Party system experienced a major electoral shock in the 2018 presidential election after the main anti-PRI opposition candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the presidential election, and his party won the majority in Congress. Similar to his 2006 populist rhetoric, Lopez Obrador during the 2018 presidential election denounced the incumbent PRI, the PAN, and the political establishment as being part of a “political mafia” that impoverished Mexico with neoliberalism and corrupt policies.

Based on a four-wave panel electoral study—that is part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)—this research finds that voters who hold populist attitudes were more likely to vote for the populist left and their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Interestingly, once López Obrador won the presidency, we found that his supporters were less likely to hold populist attitudes. In other words, we find that their populist attitudes were deactivated in the last waves of our panel survey conducted after the election. These results have important implications for the study of populism. Our results suggest that populism is not always salient but is mobilized by context (e.g. failures of democratic governance) and strategic politicians who presents themselves as genuine representatives of the “people.”

Authors

• Rodrigo Castro Cornejo, University of Virginia

• Sandra Jessica Ley Gutierrez, CIDE

• Ulises Beltran