Populism and Democratic Erosion in Latin America

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries I

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the effect that populist leaders have on certain dimensions of liberal democracy, particularly in eroding judicial and legislative constraints on the Executive, but not necessarily others (e.g., extension of the suffrage) in Latin America. We also seek to explain how the sequence and timing of democratic erosions vary from one country to another. We propose an agency-based approach since we conceive democratic erosion as the consequence of the beliefs, preferences and strategies of populist leaders. Populist leaders utilize a highly polarized style of discourse, embrace radical policy change and push for constitutional transformation, triggering high levels of political polarization. If the opposition reacts to the Manichean discourse of populist leaders with insurrectional strategies, this produces a deleterious effect on liberal democracy. On the one hand, any opposition that illegally ousts a populist leader faces the challenge of dealing with a considerable popular support that they keep. Given the preexisting extreme polarization, post-populist governments may implement antidemocratic policies against populist leaders and their supporters. On the other hand, a failed military coup allows incumbent populists to challenge the opposition’s democratic commitment and push for even more radicalized policies.

To investigate this theoretical framework, we implement a mixed-methods research design, focusing on 70 Latin American leaders between 1989 and 2019 for a total of 540 country-year observations. One central contribution that this paper makes over the existing literature is a more effective measurement strategy. We use the continuous measures of the Global Populism Database (GPD) and the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) to measure our main independent and dependent variables. Moreover, we create a time series cross-sectional analysis that provides a more precise view of how populist leaders erode democratic rule and which dimensions of democracy are most vulnerable to this kind of erosion. To avoid endogeneity issues common to previous studies on this topic, we employ several quasi-experimental methods, including difference-in-differences (DID) and generalized synthetic control, using Latin American countries that have experienced low levels of populism as the donor pool to impute a counterfactual for those countries that experienced higher levels of populism.

We combine this quantitative analysis with Bayesian process-tracing to test contending theories that are present in the literature, as well as, our own theory (Fairfield and Charman 2017). In order to do this and following Goertz (2017), we systematically compare three cases that have shown the highest values on both levels of populism and democratic erosion: Venezuela (1999-2013), Bolivia (2006-2019), and Ecuador (2006-2016). Making a comparison between these cases allows us to explain the causal effect of the variance of the timing and sequencing of the erosion of different dimensions of democracy on different regimes trajectories.

Authors

• Benjamin Garcia Garcia Holgado, University of Notre Dame

• Jacob Turner, University of Notre Dame