Populist Leaders and the Threat to Liberal Democracy

• In Event: Polarization, Populism and Threats to Liberal Democracy

Abstract

This paper explains why populist presidents have a negative effect on certain dimensions of liberal democracy, such as judicial and legislative constraints on the Executive, in Latin America. Our ideational-based theory states that the beliefs of populist presidents are the main drivers of democratic erosion for three reasons. First, the populist conception of democracy is identitarian and substantive, not procedural, drawing legitimacy from the “the true people,” not simply circumstantial electoral majorities. Liberal democratic institutions therefore illegitimately limit the expression of the identity and will of “the true people.” Second, populist presidents claim that the people’s identity and will can only be represented by them, without any institutional and organizational mediations. Finally, since “the elites” are a threat to “the true people,” their rights and liberties should be severely restricted. Given these anti-pluralistic and anti-liberal preferences, populist presidents are ideologically motivated to produce democratic erosion.
To test the impact of populist presidents on liberal democratic institutions, we implement a mixed-methods research design. First, we demonstrate that there is a statistical relationship between the levels of populist discourse of 70 Latin American presidents and a decline in the values of several indicators of liberal democracy. Since our theory suggests that it is not simply the presence of a populist leader but also the extent to which the leader actively expresses a populist worldview in their communications with the public, our measurement strategy improves on previous work by using the continuous measures of the Global Populism Database (GPD). While previous studies have operationalized populism as a binary variable where a leader is either populist or not, the GPD measures the intensity of populist discourse for each president, allowing for our models to estimate a more fine-grained effect for populist ideology on indicators of democracy. We also employ indicators from Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) to measure our main dependent variables. The continuous indicators of V-Dem are more sensitive to small changes in democratic institutions and are therefore better able to capture the gradual democratic erosion associated with populist leaders. Our difference-in-differences models suggest that an increase in the populist ideology of a president measured through their discourse is associated with small but significant downturns in the quality of democratic institutions independently of other factors traditionally associated with democratic erosion including economic crises, party system fractionalization, economic development, social inequality, oil rents, criminal violence, and civil war.
Second, in order to analyze the causal mechanisms that explain how presidents with populist beliefs have a negative impact on liberal democracy we choose from our sample the three Latin american countries that have had presidents with the highest values of populism and also the most significant democratic erosion. We conduct case studies using process-tracing of Venezuela under the presidency of Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales (2006-2019), and Ecuador under the presidency of Rafael Correa (2006-2016). Following their populist ideology, these leaders implemented a comprehensive strategy of institutional reform in order to undermine liberal democracy. As these populist leaders’ anti-liberal preferences and radical policy platforms became clear to opposition parties, a spiral of high levels of political polarization was triggered. In these three cases, the opposition reacted with non-institutional and radical strategies, which further created a deleterious effect on liberal democracy. When the opposition illegally ousted the populist leader, as with Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019, it faced the challenge of dealing with a considerable popular support that he kept. Moreover, given the preexisting extreme polarization, post-populist governments implemented strong antidemocratic policies against the former populist president and their supporters. On the other hand, a failed military coup, as occurred in Venezuela in 2002, allowed Chávez the incumbent populist president to challenge the opposition’s democratic commitment and pushed for even more radicalized policies and more democratic erosion.

Authors

• Benjamin Garcia Garcia Holgado, University of Notre Dame

• Jacob Turner, University of Notre Dame