The Social Bases of Populist Domination: Illiberal Coalitions in New Democracies

• In Event: Populist Attitudes and Communication

Abstract

The recent populist wave around the world has raised serious concerns about the rise of illiberalism and its effects on liberal constitutionalism. Yet not all populists subvert liberal democracy by entrenching themselves in power; while some manage to establish decades-long domination over the executive branch, others are considerably less successful in the long run. This paper explains the sources of variation in populist domination over executive power by highlighting the importance of pre-existing electoral coalitions in Latin America and post-communist Europe, two regions where democratic illiberalism has been especially salient since the transitions from dictatorship to liberal democracy.

Following Guillermo O’Donnell’s intuition that delegative democracy is possible in both presidential and parliamentary systems (O’Donnell 1994: 69), I argue against much of the institutionalist literature, which tends to explain long-term populist domination as a function of incumbency advantage acquired by means of natural resource wealth (Weyland 2009), competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Loxton 2013), organizationally capable parties (Levitsky and Burgess 2001; Grzymała-Busse 2002; Tavits 2013), or presidential elections (Polga-Hecimovich 2014). Additionally, while recent historical institutionalist literature identifies bait-and-switch policies during critical junctures of market reform as precursors to populism (Roberts 2014), populists’ varying propensity to dominate political systems in the long term has received much less attention.

My cross-regional analysis takes a step beyond such accounts based on the study of regionally-specific developments. I argue that long-term populist domination is best explained as a consequence of populists’ ability to mobilize – even before ascending to power – broad pre-existing electoral coalitions previously dominated by labor-based parties that adopt pro-market policies. In particular, I compare developments in four cases where, although similar bait-and-switch policies characterized the process of market liberalization, populists’ ability to command the executive in the long term varied. Using a mixed-methods research strategy, I identify the causes and processes behind the contrasting experiences of, on the one hand, Ecuador and Slovakia, where populists controlled executive power over a decade, and, on the other hand, of Peru and Poland, where populists were considerably less successful in terms of dominating the executive. I do so by (1) developing weighted Party Nationalization Scores (Bochsler 2010) to measure the breadth of electoral coalitions for hundreds of relevant political actors that participated in democratic elections and by (2) using evidence from fieldwork in the four countries under study. By analyzing outcomes in cases chosen for dual paired comparisons (Tarrow 2010), the paper develops a theory about how market reform implementation, societal reactions, and variable populist outcomes are related in similar ways across world regions.

Author

• Binio Slavov Binev, Virginia Tech