Erosion of Democracy: Populism and Its Causes

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The electoral success of populists in the advanced industrial democracies has brought new attention to a topic that was previously studied mostly in the developing world, especially Latin America. The sense of urgency is great. Populism is seen as problematic for democracy: populists often undermine liberal democratic institutions once they are in power, yet populists also respond to democratic failures, basing their appeal on an argument that institutions and politicians are systematically denying segments of the electorate their voice. Thus, populism is not just a problem for democracy but a symptom of its failures. This means that the study of populism offers political scientists a unique window into democracy. If we can identify the reasons why citizens support populist movements, we may also come to understand the ways in which liberal democracy sometimes fails in its promise of representation.

Happily, scholarly efforts to identify the causes of populism are growing more advanced. For the past decade, scholars studying populism have been locked in a debate over whether the causes are mostly economic, rooted in declining material well-being; or cultural, representing a reaction to changing values and identities. More recent work moves beyond this debate by studying the individual-level causal mechanisms by which distant structural forces activate citizen’s populist anger. Most of this work argues, not surprisingly, that the key mechanism underlying populism’s electoral success is one of resentment or anger over perceived failures of democratic representation. Impressively, findings based on these arguments are coming from multiple countries in different regions and historical periods.

In this panel we showcase these recent, synthetic efforts to explain the causes of populism. Not only do these papers offer more generalizable causal arguments, but they present data from various regions and levels of analysis using multiple methods.

We start with a presentation by Hawkins et al. of their book project, one that takes the ideational definition of populism and weaves it into a comprehensive causal argument, then tests this argument using multiple methods of analysis. Analyses include large-N country studies, case studies, survey data, and experiments from around the globe. The next paper, by Carrión, takes us back to the study of populism in Latin America. It moves beyond the analysis of well-known contemporary cases to build a general causal model describing the “causal chain” producing populist governance in Latin America, a chain built out of context, actors, choices, and causal processes. It tests this argument through a comparative analysis of five contemporary and historical cases.

The third paper, by McNamara, explicitly attempts to move beyond the economy vs. culture debate through a geographically rooted narrative about how economic opportunities reshape subjective class identities and a perceived sense of grievance. It explores this theory through a study of populism in the United States.

Finally, the paper by Noam and Gidron explores the causal mechanisms of populist support at the individual level, especially by examining feelings of social marginalization. To do this, their paper analyzes measures of subjective social status in mass survey data across the industrialized world.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• The Ideational Approach to Populism - Kirk A. Hawkins, Brigham Young University; Ryan Carlin, Georgia State University; Levente Littvay, Central European University; Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Universidad Diego Portales

• A Dynamic Theory of Populist Governance: The Case of the Andean Countries - Julio F. Carrion, University of Delaware

• Place Matters: How Economic Experience and Identity Interact to Explain Populism - Kathleen R. McNamara, Georgetown University; Paula Daniela Ganga, Georgetown University

• Populism as a Problem of Social Integration - Noam Gidron, Hebrew University; Peter A. Hall, Harvard University

Chair

• Kirk A. Hawkins Brigham Young University

Discussant

• Kenneth M. Roberts Cornell University