Are Supporters of Populism Less Likely to Support Democracy in Latin America?

• In Event: Democratic Attitudes, Populism, and Opposition to Immigration in Latin America

Abstract

Hugo Chavez ushered in the most recent iteration of populism in Latin America when he won the 1998 Venezuelan presidential elections, followed by the electoral victories of Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2005, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, both in 2006. These leftist leaders took a decidedly authoritarian bent, accumulating power, limiting political opposition and effectively undermining systems of checks and balances. At the same time, they co-opted state institutions and put constraints on the independent media. In many ways, these leaders distorted democracy, yet they still garnered formidable popular support. Chávez, Correa, Ortega and Morales were re-elected three times in a row, and for long periods enjoyed high approval ratings. Does this mean that the supporters of these populist leaders have lower support for democracy and its institutions?
David Easton’s seminal work argued that support for democracy must be measured at different levels, and Pippa Norris further proposed a breakdown of Easton’s categories. In this paper, we use this theoretical framework to assess support for democracy, democratic principles and democratic institutions in four countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples' Trade Treaty or ALBA-TCP (hereafter ALBA), and examine the relationship that exists with public support for populism.
We operationalize support for populism as having voted or having the intention to vote for those populist leaders, as well as overall approval for these leaders. To predict these dependent variables, we include in our regression models different measures of support for democracy, satisfaction with democracy, support for democratic principles, and support for democratic institutions (Congress, political parties, the judiciary and the media). Scholars have noted that one of the ways in which populists undermine democracy is by attacking the institutions of representative democracy to get to power. Once they achieve power, they continue undermining democratic institutions either by continued attacks or by putting in office loyalists who will bend to their desires. All ALBA populist leaders were first elected on a platform of attack towards Congress and other democratic institutions, arguing that those institutions represented the oligarchy and the elites in detriment of the people. In addition to attacks on Congress, the radical left populist also attacked political parties and in fact, except for the case of Nicaragua, they created new political movements that morphed into some type of non-traditional political party to run for repeated elections over the years. They also initially attacked the judicial system, but some were able to put loyalists in key positions so that the courts would back some critical—and controversial—decisions and policies they adopted. Finally, they consistently attacked the media through measures to limit its outreach, but also to undermine their credibility in the eyes of the public. Using the framework proposed by The Latin American Voter (Carlin, Singer and Zechmeister), we use as controls in our regression models a series of variables related to the demographics of the respondents, substantive offerings (for example the ideology of the respondents) and citizens’ perception of the performance of the populist leaders in issues related to the economy, crime and corruption.
Our analysis is longitudinal, relying upon data from 41 different surveys (14 in Venezuela, 11 in Bolivia, 8 in Ecuador and 8 in Nicaragua) ranging from 1998 to 2017 to test the relationship between the support for populism and the support for democracy over time. We use logistic and ordinal regression analysis, depending on the type of dependent variable. Most of the data comes from the AmericasBarometer; however, since surveys from the AmericasBarometer were not conducted for the period between 1998 and 2006, we use Latinbarometer surveys for those years.

Authors

• Dinorah Azpuru, Wichita State University

• Mary Fran T. Malone, University of New Hampshire