Why do most authoritarian regimes installed by populist chief executives not become full-scale, repressive dictatorships? As explanation, scholars argue that populist leaders base their rule on charismatic appeal and voluntary mass support; therefore, they do not need harsh coercion, which would undermine their popular legitimacy. While corroborating this argument, I highlight a crucial complementary factor: populist chief executives find it difficult to marshal large-scale political repression. After all, their insistence on personalistic autonomy and unconstrained predominance creates tension with the military institution, the mainstay of organized coercion. Due to this inherent distance, most populist rulers lack the dependable military support to sustain the imposition of harsh autocracy. I substantiate these arguments with relevant cases from contemporary Latin America, especially Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru.

This article argues that the incipient literature on opposition to populism's authoritarian backsliding needs to embed its agency-focused approach in fundamental institutional and structural factors that heavily condition the chances for opposition success. Above all, the degree of strength that the preexisting institutional framework commands; and the contextual conditions that affect populist leaders' mass support; set basic parameters for opposition choices and their impact. These factors account much better for opposition success or failure than the tactical and strategic decisions that populists' adversaries make. The paper substantiates these arguments through brief comparative examinations of a wide range of populist chief-executives, their political fate, and the opposition's experiences. Covering both rightwing and leftwing populism, this analysis focuses primarily on Latin America.

Despite Giovanni Sartori’s famous warning, contemporary academia has seen a new bout of conceptual stretching, as evident in the loose, expansive usage of terms such as coup and fascism . This concept creep reflects the normative progress of recent decades, which has ruled out true fascism and deterred full-scale coups. Because these normative advances have induced remaining nefarious actors to pursue their undemocratic goals through formally democratic procedures, ambiguity has blurred conceptual boundaries. The article posits that when examining this gray area, scholars may be tempted to overuse dramatic terms because concern about new threats to democracy has motivated a turn to public intellectualism and democratic engagement. Moreover, the proliferation of social media has fueled stiff competition for public attention, which may have helped to create a penchant for stark warnings. The author argues that the resulting conceptual stretching undermines the clarity and accuracy required for academic scholarship and that such imprecision can also be counterproductive for scholars’ normative concerns. The overuse of dramatic terms risks distorting problem diagnosis, exacerbating polarization, and thus reinforcing the danger facing contemporary democracy, which arises primarily from the specific challenges that illiberal populism poses.

Abstract Hybrid regimes long preceded the post-Cold War era highlighted by Levitsky and Way’s seminal analysis. During the nineteenth century in Europe, socioeconomic modernization and the gradual advance of political liberalism led long-established monarchies to concede suffrage reforms, protections of human and civil rights, and steps toward the parliamentary responsibility of governments. The resulting hybrid regimes, which allowed for learning and habituation among diverse political actors, constituted transitional stages in the “first wave of democratization,” which powerful labor movements and broader societal mobilization brought to a successful conclusion, especially in the continent’s northwest. In Latin America, by contrast, learning and diffusion from the United States and Europe propelled comparatively “early,” developmentally premature steps toward political liberalism. Given limited modernization and weak societal activism, these hybrid regimes were dominated by established elites, which corrupted liberalism’s formal institutions through informal machinations and electoral fraud. Entrenched elitism and endemic instability hindered transitions to democracy.

This chapter presents the political-strategic approach to populism in its conceptual development and theoretical provenance, especially its roots in Weber's analysis of charismatic leadership. I consider recent contributions and examine the approach's advantages vis-à-vis alternative frameworks, especially the broad, heterogeneous set of ideational and discursive approaches. Subsequent sections highlight the political-strategic approach's special benefits during the current wave of populism. Now that in so many countries populist leaders have become chief executives, it is especially important to go beyond investigations of populists' rhetorical appeals and understand how they actually govern, extend their power and thus endanger liberal democracy. Demonstrating its heuristic value, the political-strategic conceptualization suggests many conjectures and hypotheses about these topics. Most importantly, populist leaders incessantly challenge and threaten democracy - but they manage to do serious damage to liberal pluralism only under specific, restrictive conditions. Thus, populism's effective threat to democracy is not as severe as recent observers fear.

The recent global wave of populist governments, which culminated in Donald Trump's victory in 2016, has convinced many observers that populism is a grave threat to democracy. In his new book, Kurt Weyland critiques recent scholarship for focusing too closely on cases where populist leaders have crushed democracy, and instead turns to the many cases where would populist-authoritarians have failed to overthrow democracy. Through a systematic comparative analysis of thirty populist chief executives in Latin America and Europe over the last four decades, Weyland reveals that populist leaders can only destroy democracy under special, restrictive conditions. Left-wing populists suffocate democracy only when benefitting from huge revenue windfalls, whereas right-wing populists must perform the heroic feat of resolving acute, severe crises. Because many populist chief executives do not face these propitious conditions, Weyland proves that despite populism's threat, democracy remains resilient.

In recent years, an old contentious tactic in which protesters besiege and harass public officials in their private homes has resurged. Discontented sectors of all stripes have employed what is most commonly called charivari or “rough music.” To elucidate this surprising reappearance, this reflection highlights the rise of conflict over cultural and moral values, affective polarization, and the personalization of politics. Moreover, the proliferation of social media has eroded the boundary between the public and private sphere and thus propelled the resurgence of privacy-breaching direct action. This interpretive essay compares the special features of revived charivari with its earlier incarnations in premodern times and in the revolutions of the long nineteenth century, and with the internet harassment of the twenty-first century. By analyzing the reappearance of a contentious tactic with premodern roots, this essay seeks to shed light on broader trends of sociopolitical development in the postmodern age.

Abstract: This essay suggests that while populism certainly can be a mortal threat to democracy, the worst outcome is less common than observers have feared. The author's research shows that among forty populist governments in Latin America and Europe from 1985 to 2020, only seven led to authoritarian rule. It concludes that democracy often shows considerable resilience, with most populist leaders failing to suffocate liberal pluralism due to institutional checks, balances, and opposition mobilization. While the threat of populism requires constant attention and energetic countermeasures, there is no need for global alarmism.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Regarding the implications of the political developments of the last five years for the study of American political development (APD), this article argues that the unprecedented Trump phenomenon and its problematic repercussions for U.S. democracy have greatly enhanced the value of a comparative perspective, which can draw instructive lessons from the fate of attacks on liberal democracy by populist leaders in other countries. Comparativists examining the contemporary United States initially highlighted the risks of populist leadership (i.e., political agency), stressed the possibilities of democratic backsliding, and examined how popularly elected chief executives can undermine democracy from the inside-all of which fueled grave concerns. Yet for a more realistic assessment of populism's actual danger for U.S. democracy, one must analyze the probability of such a deleterious outcome. Therefore, researchers need to embed agency in contextual conditions and investigate what institutional, structural, cultural, and conjunctural factors empowered populist leaders to destroy democracy in some countries, whereas other constellations of these factors have impeded democratic backsliding in many other nations. With this move beyond a primary focus on agency, comparative analyses align with APD's longstanding attention to complex context factors. Interestingly, such a comparative perspective corroborates the distinctive institutional strengths and relative resilience of U.S. democracy.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This chapter examines how establishment sectors, ranging from the right to the moderate left, responded to the rash efforts of radical left-wingers to replicate Lenin's revolutionary success in Russia in a wide range of countries. Fearful of Communism, status-quo defenders everywhere squashed these precipitous uprisings. For this purpose, they employed excessive violence and resorted to significant "overkill." This reaction was driven by cognitive heuristics, which inspired an overestimation of the extreme-left threat and which activated loss aversion and thus prompted a disproportionately drastic response. Going beyond repression, the reaction to this early riptide of left-wing revolutionary efforts included the emergence of fascism in Italy, which arose in direct struggle against leftist contention; and the imposition of authoritarianism in Hungary, which followed upon a failed "Soviet Republic." The chapter provides substantial analyses of these two cases and explains why different types of autocracy emerged in these two countries.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Because democracy was not uniformly overthrown during the 1920s and 1930s, Chapter 9 investigates the edges of the autocratic wave. The analysis focuses on Finland, France, and Czechoslovakia, which faced important attacks from the fascist right, yet succeeded in maintaining liberal democracy. Democratic forces in these nations drew on different sources of strength to avoid both an extreme-right power seizure and the imposition of conservative authoritarianism by establishment sectors. Moreover, the chapter also explores the unusual case of Argentina, where a fascist project emerged in the mid-1940s, yet the global de-legitimation of fascism in 1945 prompted its transformation into authoritarian populism, which subsequently turned into a model in Latin America.

One of the main ways in which populism damages democracy is through the corrosion of political-party systems, a phenomenon that has been especially pronounced in contemporary Latin America. Populism’s core, namely charismatic leadership, is to blame: Overbearing personalistic leaders avoid hemming in their own autonomy and predominance by keeping their electoral movements organizationally fluid and weak. And because opposing populism entails confronting a charismatic leader rather than a clear programmatic project, the opposition itself remains diverse and heterogeneous and thus fails to unify and form a political party. Latin America’s fragmented social structure, high economic volatility, and frequent corruption scandals exacerbate these corrosive tendencies.