Populists in Power

Takis S. Pappas

Journal of Democracy, Volume 30, Number 2, April 2019, pp. 70-84 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0026

Takis S. Pappas is the author of Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece (2014) and the coeditor (with Hanspeter Kriesi) of European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession (2015). The following essay draws on his Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (2019).

Seen in historical perspective and conceptualized as simply as possible, modern populism is best defined as democratic illiberalism. In the era of postwar liberal democracy, populism presents a political alternative that retains elections, yet in other ways is inimical to the liberal principles and institutions that, by definition, underpin liberal democracy. To put it even more bluntly: Populism is the mirror-image opposite, and a major foe, of contemporary liberal democracy.

What do I mean by liberal principles and institutions? Political liberalism as the world has known it since 1945 features three key — and interrelated — components. The first is its recognition that any society is unavoidably a place of many, often cross-cutting, divisions that generate conflicts. This brings us to liberalism’s second component: its understanding of the need for society’s parts, especially as represented by political parties, to behave moderately, seek consensus, and prefer positive-sum outcomes. This need is best met via liberalism’s third component, which is its stress on adherence to safeguards for minority rights and the rule of law, as expressed primarily in written constitutions.

Flip the coin and you find populism, which displays exactly the oppo- site features. It holds that society is split by a single overriding cleavage between the vast majority and a tiny elite, and asserts that this cleavage is unbridgeable. Populist politics, therefore, is all about social hostility and incessant conflict. In such a view, the rule of law and the protection of minority rights become secondary. What really matters is satisfying the majority that makes up “the people”— irrespective of constitutional legality, established procedural rules, instituted norms of deliberation, and overlapping consensus.

Now suppose a populist party comes to power in a country with a liberal constitutional tradition and stays in office for some time, say two consecutive electoral periods. What is likely to be the character of its rule, and what are the consequences that it will leave behind? To help us answer such crucial questions, there are seven post-1945 cases that we can examine.

In each of these cases, a populist party won power singlehandedly and held it for at least two consecutive terms. In chronological order, dating from the year the populist party came to power, these countries are: Argentina (1946), Greece (1981), Peru (1990), Italy (1994), Venezuela (1998), Ecuador (2007), and Hungary (2010) (1). This set of cases offers remarkable variation in terms of time (from the outset of the post-war era to the present) and space (across two continents). It also spans a number of political cultures and continental subregions, as well as a major ideological divide (since populisms of both the left and the right are included). The comparative analysis of such a diverse set of long-ruling populists provides invaluable lessons about other populists who came to power more recently and are currently serving their first term in office in their respective countries (2).

How Populists Rule

Once in power, modern populism seeks to establish an order that is democratic but not liberal. Populism typically displays four interrelated — and mutually reinforcing — characteristics: 1) a reliance on extraordinary charismatic leadership; 2) the ceaseless, strategic pursuit of political polarization; 3) a drive to seize control of the state, emasculate liberal institutions, and impose an illiberal constitution; and 4) the systematic use of patronage to reward supporters and crowd out the opposition. Figure 1 below schematically depicts the populist power nexus in the shape of a diamond.

Charismatic leaders have been rare in the history of liberal democracy, but they have been crucial to populism — no populist party has ever risen to power without one at its head. Charismatic populist leaders often combine an authority that is personalist in character with radical political aims (3). Personalist authority means that the leader has full and untrammeled sway over a party or movement that he (all founding populists have been men) has created, with the relationship between leader and followers conceived as direct and unmediated. The radical aims are to delegitimize the status quo legally (and nonviolently) and then to erect a novel system of political authority in its place. Ordinary (or to use Max Weber’s term, “legal-bureaucratic”) leadership is not in the mix here.

Consider the seven founding populist leaders from our seven cases.

Figure 1 — The Populist-Rule Diamond

Note: Two-way arrows indicate all-through interdependencies.

Juan Perón, Andreas Papandreou, Alberto Fujimori, Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, and Viktor Orbán all fit the category of “charismatic.” The label of “radical” fits them all, since populism as democratic illiberalism is by definition a radical project — it intends to replace one political order with another that populists say is morally superior. Each leader is also associated with a personalist approach to power. They all founded parties or movements that they later led to landslide electoral victories (4). In all cases, the establishment of the leader’s centralizing authority required intense infighting and the ruthless expulsion of intraparty opponents.

Finally, all our charismatic populist leaders enjoyed the adulation of their followers. Enthusiastic mass rallies (Perón, Papandreou, and Chávez held particularly impressive examples) supply evidence of this. Berlusconi had a personal media empire to amplify his message, while Orbán exemplifies the use of state-controlled media to achieve the same effect. Liberal opponents of populism in every case found it hard to counter personal charisma with logical arguments and coherent policy proposals.

When in power, populist parties invariably raise polarization to a new pitch of intensity. We are not, let us note, speaking of the more conventional ideological polarization that Giovanni Sartori and others have studied (5). That type of polarization has to do with differences over concrete policy issues and clashing political designs. Because populism is neither a coherent ideology nor tied to a specific policy agenda, the polarization that it generates can be described as more strategic than programmatic. Such polarization serves populism’s political aims well; indeed, there has never been a case of populist rule without it.

Whereas ideological polarization depends on existing ideological cleavages (chiefly the left-right split), populist polarization is the work of political entrepreneurs who see advantages in pressing conflict rather than pursuing consensus. Such polarization helps to make more broadly perceptible, and to solidify, the cleavage that populism requires between “the people” and some “elite.” The stark and all-embracing nature of this cleavage (you are either with the people or else with the elite) promotes a high-stakes, zero-sum competition in which institutional legality, politi- cal compromise, and social moderation count for little. When patronage is introduced amid this atmosphere of polarization — in a system that relies on charismatic leadership at the expense of horizontal accountability — the center is unlikely to hold. Political and party competition tends to boil down to just two broadly defined groups, the populists and the liberals, with no room left for other democratic parties to play significant roles.

Our seven cases suggest that populists in power try to 1) colonize the state by appointing party loyalists at all levels of the state bureaucracy; 2) launch a massive assault on liberal institutions; and 3) set up a new constitutional order that replaces institutions of horizontal accountability with others more vertical in nature.

Without exception, populists in office have tried to enlarge the state and fill government jobs with political supporters in order to expand the populist leader and party’s control over crucial institutions. Under Perón, for instance, Argentina’s civil service grew from 120,000 employees in 1945 to 540,000 ten years later. Similarly, in Greece under Papandreou’s premiership in the 1980s, the ranks of public-sector employees swelled by more than 50 percent, eventually containing close to eight-hundred–thousand people in a country of only about ten million. In Venezuela, when employees of the state oil company complained about government policies in 2003, Chávez sacked almost twenty-thousand protesting workers and replaced them with loyal regime supporters.

After this first step of “state-grabbing”, ruling populists turn their sights toward institutions that undergird liberal democracy. These include the media, the judiciary, the educational system, and any organi- zations in society that might support dissent from populist rule. Perón closed newspapers; Fujimori shuttered Peru’s Congress and Supreme Court; Chávez fired scores of judges and dissolved the Venezuelan Supreme Court; Orbán forced the Central European University to leave Hungary. As Papandreou once told a rally of his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), “There are no institutions. Only the people rule”. The third step, typically undertaken by populist parties soon after they come to power, is to replace or (in the case of Greece in 1984) to revise heavily the existing liberal constitution. New constitutions were adopted in Argentina (1949), Peru (1993), Venezuela (1999), and Hungary (2011). The goal in each country was to strengthen the executive as opposed to the courts and legislature, and to impede the protection of liberal constitutional rights. Only in Italy and Ecuador did strong opposition force the populist leader to drop plans for a constitutional overhaul.

Figure 2 — Populism’s Pathways

Finally, the heavy use of state patronage is a feature of all our populism-in-power cases. To ruling populists, patronage seems a handy tool for several reasons. It fills the gap left by populist parties’ tendency to lack a coherent policy agenda. Even if laws are being broken, moreover, populists can portray patronage as the lifeblood of well-meant and righteous social policies. Lastly, giving out patronage helps populists to win over voters who feel dissatisfied with liberal parties’ past failures and current opposition status but who are not yet convinced of the populist promise. In order to solidify itself in power, populism needs such voters. By wielding patronage to build support and moral legitimacy while demoralizing opponents, ruling populists make a reality of what in opposition they had claimed society to be — a scene of constant conflict between two antagonistic groups. An underprivileged moral majority becomes the backbone of populist rule, set against elite social groups and privileged minorities. State-controlled rents and other patronage benefits cement the populist constituency while rendering the left-out nonpopulist opposition less secure. Liberal parties watch their electoral chances dim as their voters reckon with what it means to be shut off from valuable state resources and other patronage-related benefits.

So far, we have examined how populist parties govern. To stay in office, they must preserve all four interdependent ingredients that we have outlined. Massive patronage flows depend on massive state capture and the enfeeblement of check-and-balance institutions, while everything depends on having a charismatic leader with extensive executive powers and a strategy of social polarization. Once populists become established in power, what are the paths that a nation might take? The available cases suggest that there are three: 1) Populism might entrench itself and become systemic, inducing weakly liberal parties to shift in a populist direction; 2) populism might turn into outright autocracy; or 3) liberal forces might defeat populism at the polls and return to power. These are illustrated by Figure 2 above.

Argentina and Greece supply us with examples of populism entrenching itself. Despite a military coup that overthrew Perón in 1955 and corruption scandals that knocked Papandreou out of power in 1989, each retained control of a formidable party machine and the loyalty of numerous voters. In these leaders’ absence, growing polarization, faltering institutions, and patronage battles led to political instability and economic crisis. Each leader staged a comeback (Perón in 1973 and Papandreou in 1993) before dying in office (in 1974 and 1996, respectively) (6).

They passed on, but populism would continue to dominate their countries’ politics long after they were gone. Why? Because even in death these leaders continued to cast long shadows over the parties they founded and those parties’ new leaders. Costas Simitis, who became prime minister after Papandreou, tried to steer PASOK in a less populist and more liberal direction, but he failed. In Argentina as well, subsequent party leaders chose to rely on the potent legacy of the charismatic founder and to keep pursuing, despite periodic crises, illiberal politics. So greatly had Argentine and Greek politics been transformed under populist rule, and so bountiful was the expected populist harvest, that even once-liberal parties began to pivot in a populist direction. How did populism take hold so effectively?

After forcing Perón into exile, the new government of General Pedro Aramburu (1955–58) banned the Peronist party and purged its loyalists. Yet Peronism thrived. Poorer neighborhoods teemed with resistance committees, handwritten propaganda, and secret meetings, as graffiti proclaimed the inevitability of Perón’s return.

Before the July 1957 election to choose a constituent assembly, the still-exiled Perón told his followers to cast blank ballots. In a remarkable display of obedience to charismatic authority, so many did so that null votes came to almost a quarter of all those cast, outstripping the vote share won by any party. Positioned as kingmaker ahead of the February 1958 presidential election, Perón agreed to endorse candidate Arturo Frondizi in exchange for the latter’s vow that if elected, he would restore the Peronist party’s legal status. Frondizi won by a landslide with Peronist votes. Attempts to reintegrate Peronists, however, led to a spiral of social and economic instability, punctuated by violence. Between 1958 and 1973, Argentina suffered military revolts, cabinet reshuffles, and a GNP growth rate that was persistently one of Latin America’s worst.

A 77-year-old Perón returned from exile in 1973 and won the presidency handily. He failed, however, to restore order or restart the econ- omy. Violence raged and the Peronist movement split into right- and left-wing factions. At the time of Perón’s death in July 1974, Argentina seemed more ungovernable than ever. His widow, Isabel, succeeded him, but failed to gain control of the crisis-ridden country. A military junta staged a coup in March 1976 and proceeded to set up one of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships Latin America has ever seen, ruling until 1983.

After democracy’s return and an interval of non-Peronist rule under President Raúl Alfonsín (1983–89), Peronism returned to power and ruled the country for decades. Interestingly, populist rule appeared in a rightist guise (during the presidencies of Carlos Menem, 1989–99) as well as in a leftist one (during the presidencies of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, 2003–15). Argentina continued to experience economic crises, some of which were among the most severe that a developed country has ever seen.

In Greece, PASOK gave way to the New Democracy (ND) party in 1989. There were attempts to reinstate liberalism, mostly via civil-service reform, and to spark the economy through bold privatization measures. Many segments of society whose interests had been served by the previous populist model of political economy put up fierce opposition, however. Their reaction triggered a general rebellion against the government; polarization and social unrest rose. In 1993, under mounting pressure from the populist opposition and with liberal tenacity scarce in its own ranks, the ND government collapsed and the way lay open for the still- charismatic Papandreou to lead PASOK back to power. What happened next was remarkable.

After its dismal spell in power, ND faced a choice: Should it cling to liberalism, or learn to play the populist game? Under the new leader- ship of Miltiades Evert, the latter option triumphed. He rebranded ND as a “people’s party” and began promising voters things that outbid even PASOK’s excessive pledges. Soon, populism became “the only game in town.” It permeated Greek politics; voters liked to be courted with populist promises, and there was no other strategy that offered a rational hope of winning office. In subsequent years, party leaders learned that the only way to win was to step up polarization and outbid one’s rivals regardless of economic prudence, political moderation, and even the rule of law. Liberal politicians learned that attempts to introduce institutional reforms would be penalized at the polls.

Memories of Papandreou and his charisma were so strong that Simitis’s efforts to lead PASOK in a more liberal direction were in vain. The party’s rank-and-file remained steadfastly populist, lacking any appetite for reforms. When Simitis stepped down as premier in 2004, PASOK tried to recapture its founder’s charisma by electing Papandreou’s son George as the new party leader.

George Papandreou led PASOK to victory in the October 2009 parliamentary elections. After decades of populist rule, however, he was taking the reins of government in a country where crisis loomed following the 2008 global financial meltdown, but where key institutions had been hollowed out (7). In May 2010, the Greek economy imploded. In order to avoid outright default, the government agreed to a bailout that required strict austerity measures and pledges of major institutional overhaul. The streets filled with protesters, and then another remarkable development occurred. Voters who had long backed the country’s two major populist parties, PASOK and ND, cut ties with them and shifted their loyalties almost overnight to new populist forces that stood farther to the left and farther to the right, respectively, on a vastly changed party spectrum.

On the left, the new champion of populism was Syriza, a coalition led by firebrand Alexis Tsipras. He tried to imitate Andreas Papandreou’s rhetorical style and even to repeat some of his political legerdemain. On the right, nationalist populism found its representative in an ND splinter party known as the Independent Greeks (ANEL). With populism so firmly entrenched in Greek politics, it is little wonder that, in the 2015 legislative elections, Syriza finished in first place with 36.3 percent of the vote. What is perhaps more remarkable is that in the election’s aftermath, Syriza chose to deal with its lack of a parliamentary majority by forming a coalition government with ANEL. Greece, meanwhile, has remained mired in low or negative growth and high unemployment, with no prospect of a clear exit as of this writing in early 2019.

Transitions to Autocracy

Quite different from an outcome of populist entrenchment, where the opposition may occasionally defeat populists at the polls, is the case of countries in which a single charismatic leader establishes populist rule and at the same time succeeds in virtually eliminating all opposition. This has been the case in Venezuela under leftist Hugo Chávez (1999– 2013) and in Hungary under rightist Viktor Orbán (2010–present). Once in power, both leaders broke away quickly and radically from political liberalism. They replaced liberal-democratic rules, norms, and values with novel forms of political organization labeled “the socialism of the twenty-first century” (Venezuela) or “illiberal democracy” (Hungary). In both countries, the liberal opposition suffered from weak leadership, ideological fragmentation, and disunity.

With little domestic pushback against their aggressive illiberalism, Chávez and Orbán turned increasingly autocratic. Yet the two countries’ trajectories have diverged, with the availability of charismatic leadership a key factor. In Hungary, Orbán has maintained the trend toward autocracy, albeit without (so far) crossing the line to outright dictator- ship. In Venezuela, things changed after Chávez died of cancer in 2013. Nicolás Maduro, his successor as president, is an uncharismatic figure with scant legitimacy. His option has been to take populist autocracy a step further — all the way to pure authoritarianism.

Chávez’s 1999 election to the presidency marked a new epoch in Venezuelan politics. The chavista era was a time of democratic activity (multiple nationwide votes were held) and of illiberal policies (8). The former army officer and failed military-coup leader pursued a strategy of polarization that soon led to a deep cleavage between his supporters and their liberal opponents — or in Chávez’s terms, “the people” and its enemies. The split offered the populist regime what it saw as legitimate grounds for rewarding its supporters with the bounty of state clientelism. Heading an oil-producing nation at a time when world oil prices were rising as part of a global commodities boom was for Chávez a great stroke of luck. Clientelist benefits flowed freely.

Yet luck can run out. By the second half of 2008, oil prices were heading sharply down while the Venezuelan state kept on spending more than it took in. Under heavy fiscal pressure and with the economic situation becoming dire, Chávez saw his popularity plummet and began intensifying the dictatorial features of his rule. Institutional legality; checks and balances; the freedom of the media, the opposition, and civil society—all suffered further erosion as Chávez’s “Bolivarian socialist” regime sensed that fiscal and economic conditions were putting it on the defensive. Gradually but visibly, Venezuela was being driven toward autocracy.

Chávez died in March 2013, shortly after his fourth victory in a presidential election and while most Venezuelans still considered him a charismatic leader. His successor Maduro lacked not only Chávez’s personal magnetism but also his early good luck. Under Maduro, Venezuela’s economy went from bad to worse while crime soared. In early 2014, as foodstuffs, medicines, and other basic goods became scarce, mass pro- tests broke out and soon escalated into daily riots nationwide. Seizing the opportunity, the liberal opposition was able to unite, organize itself, and challenge Maduro electorally. What was he to do?

In the December 2015 parliamentary election, the opposition alliance won a three-fifths supermajority that briefly seemed like it might be able to claw back power from the president. Yet Maduro, by now deeply unpopular, was determined to cling to power. In May 2016, the regime-controlled National Electoral Council blocked the opposition’s drive for a referendum to recall him. The slide into authoritarianism accelerated in March 2017, when the puppet Supreme Court dissolved the opposition-controlled legislature. A fresh election for a constituent assembly, called by presidential decree, came in July. The opposition boycotted it, however, so this body was composed solely of ruling-party members.

In December, a round of municipal elections held across the country gave Maduro the chance not only to claim another victory — the opposition boycotted again — but also to inch closer to dictatorship. With a new presidential election set for May 2018, Maduro declared that the parties boycotting the municipal races had thereby disqualified themselves from running candidates in any future election — an act immediately backed by the stooge constituent assembly. In May, in an election with the lowest turnout in modern Venezuelan history (barely over 46 percent), Maduro won 68 percent and a fresh term. Yet he is not the president of a democracy — there has been too much electoral fraud and regime violence to call Venezuela that now.

Among all the instances of populism in office, Hungary’s is perhaps the most unusual. That Viktor Orbán has been able to build his illiberalstate so quickly and successfully in a country that belongs to the liberal-democratic club of the EU is remarkable. So is the degree to which the Hungarian model seems exportable, both within Europe and beyond. Finally, Hungarian populism seems notable in its tendency to move toward greater autocracy rather than to return to liberalism.

Under Orbán’s leadership, consecutive governments dominated by his Fidesz party since 2010 have transformed Hungary into what Orbán proudly calls an “illiberal democracy”. Political polarization has increased steeply, checks and balances have been systematically dismantled, and the economy, despite overall growth, has taken on the characteristics of crony capitalism.

While Orbán has been achieving international fame as a political trailblazer and role model for other populists, EU officials have done little to stop his country’s movement toward institutionalized popu- lism or to defend political liberalism at the European level. More ominously still, Orbán’s model of democratic illiberalism has shown itself to be attractive to other leaders in Europe and possibly even the Americas (9). Orbán argues that Europe’s postwar liberal consensus has come to an end. It has been largely due to his influence that the four Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) have emerged as a nationalistic and largely illiberal group within the EU, blocking further European integration and abetting Russia’s expansionist strategy.

Since Orbán and Fidesz reached power as a result of the April 2010 parliamentary elections, they have used their constitutional supermajority to rewrite the rules of the political game, taking Hungary away from liberalism and toward autocracy. In March 2018, the Bertelsmann Stiftung said that the country “was ‘nearing’ the threshold of autocracy” (10). In September, a report prepared by Judith Sargentini, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, meticulously documented how Orbán’s increasingly autocratic regime attacks the whole gamut of rights that must be treated as unalienable if liberal democracy is to exist (11).

Based on the Sargentini report, the European Parliament voted 448 to 197 (with 48 abstentions) to trigger Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union and to propose suspending Hungary’s voting rights within EU institutions. It was an unprecedented decision taken precisely because Orbán’s populist regime was found to be in serious breach of the liberal-democratic principles that the EU embraces. What will happen in Hungary next, and especially after the charismatic 55-year-old Viktor Orbán is gone, is anyone’s guess.

Populist Dispersion

A leader’s leaving the scene is not the only way in which the charismatic leadership so vital to populism can vanish. There have been cases of populism rising to power thanks to a leader who seems extraordinary, but who then cannot sustain his political charisma. Peru, Italy, and Ecuador all have witnessed this. Berlusconi in Italy and Correa in Ecuador each lost touch with his party base. Scandals broke out in Peru and Italy, and liberal institutions such as the media and legal authorities retained enough effectiveness and integrity to publicize and investigate them, leaving Fujimori and Berlusconi no longer able to stay in power. In Italy, moreover, potentially charismatic political competitors emerged to lead better-organized parties with more radical messages, forcing Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to take a backseat to the Five Star Movement and the remodeled Lega Nord.

In all these instances, the fading of the founding leader’s charisma sent the populist party into decline. Yet that may not be the end of the story, for even as liberal democracy returns, populism can become dispersed across the political system. There it lingers, perhaps to be revived if liberal institutions or political forces falter, or if a crisis raises doubts about liberalism’s effectiveness and legitimacy. A critical factor, indeed the most critical, will be the presence or absence of a new charismatic leader who can reunite the scattered populist constituency and make it once again a formidable political force.

Let us further consider the cases of Peru, Italy, and Ecuador. As Peru’s president throughout the 1990s, Alberto Fujimori behaved like an autocrat. The fractured opposition could do little to stop him as he proceeded to dismantle institutional checks and balances. In the year 2000, he looked ready to keep going. He put together a narrow runoff victory to claim a third term as president, and even survived a round of postelection protests sparked by alleged irregularities in the polls. It was a corruption scandal that brought about his fall and the implosion of his populist regime. In September 2001, a video became public that showed Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of Peru’s intelligence service, bribing an opposition leader to defect to Fujimori’s party. Fujimori’s legitimacy and mass support soon crumbled, and his government fell apart. In No- vember, he fled to Japan and faxed his resignation. His regime collapsed along with his presidency.

Peru thus returned to liberal democracy, but with institutions damaged by a decade of populist rule. Since then, a series of uncharismatic presidents—Alejandro Toledo, Alan García, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski — has worked fitfully to restore liberal institutions, but with little success amid swirling corruption scandals. Interestingly, Fujimori’s daughter Keiko has tried to achieve a charismatic succession by twice running for president at the head of the right-wing Fuerza Popular party, only to lose narrowly in both 2011 and 2016. In October 2018, a Peruvian court sentenced her to three years of pretrial detention in a case stemming from the international scandal around the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht.

In Italy, when the country’s highest court of appeals upheld Silvio Berlusconi’s criminal conviction for tax fraud in August 2013, the ex-premier’s charisma was already on the wane. Former supporters were turning their backs on him, while new populist leaders were seeking to overshadow him. Beppe Grillo, like Berlusconi a media figure turned politician, had cofounded the Five Star Movement in 2010, seeking to blend populist rhetoric with a liberal spirit, leftist oratory with conservative policies, and personalist leadership with impersonal intraparty processes.

In 2013, Matteo Salvini became Lega Nord’s leader and began turning the regional party into a force with national-level appeal. He rebranded it simply as Lega, dropped talk of secession by northern Italy, and adopted a more nativist and anti-EU discourse. Amid these dramatic changes, the octogenarian Berlusconi made another run for the premier-ship in 2018, but his Forza Italia finished well behind at the polls. Populism Berlusconi-style had reached its end, but Italian populism more generally had not. After the 2018 polling, Lega and the Five Star Movement combined to form a majority, and populism can now be said to be widely dispersed and widely influential in Italian party politics.

Alone among our cases, Ecuador presents an instance of a country making a resolute break with populism (12). In 2017, with a presidential election looming and worried that his own popularity was flagging, Rafael Correa handpicked his lieutenant Lenín Moreno to be the ruling party’s presidential candidate. Correa nurtured a hope and was troubled by a fear. His hope was that Moreno would win and continue Correa’s “citizens’ revolution” in pursuit of “twenty-first–century socialism.” His fear was that Moreno might lose to a center-right opponent who would bring a decade of plebiscitary correísmo to an end. In a curious way, both the hope and the fear came true: Moreno narrowly won, but he then abandoned his pledge to continue Correa’s policies in order to govern according to his own — mostly liberal — ideas. Where his predecessor was a polarizing rabble-rouser, the new president became a consensus-seeker, building bridges with the opposition and various interest groups in society. He sacked government and ruling-party officials facing corruption charges, and vowed to respect the constitution and the rule of law. He also promised to grant full independence to the judiciary, the electoral authority, and the prosecutor’s office. The changes have been major, though it is still too early to say whether Moreno’s liberalism will triumph over Correa’s populist agenda in shaping Ecuador’s future political course.

Advancing the Study of Populism

The foregoing analysis advances our understanding of populism in three ways. First, the comparative examination of all liberal democracies that have experienced populist rule for at least two successive electoral periods delineates a common blueprint of populist rule. Presented here as Figure 1’s diamond-shaped grid of interdependencies, populist rule is devised and coordinated by a charismatic leader who systemati- cally uses polarization and targeted patronage, disregarding institutional legality and the rule of law. Our cases suggest that once populists enter office, they tend to display exceptionally strong electoral and political resilience.

Second, our comparative analysis reveals three different pathways after populism. The first, as exemplified by the cases of Argentina and Greece, leads to a polity in which populism entrenches itself and becomes the dominant way of “playing” the national political “game.” The second pathway, which has already been taken in Venezuela and Hungary, leads to political autocracy and can culminate in outright dictatorship. The third pathway after populism looks more like a circuitous and meandering way back to liberal democracy, but it most often remains a mirage. Our assessment also reveals that the crucial variable determining which pathway a country will take is the pres- ence or absence of charismatic leadership: Can it endure all the while that populism is in office? Does it shape the patterns of succession to the highest office?

Third, by demonstrating that populist rule leads to liberalism’s decay and sometimes even to democratic breakdown, we have refuted beyond any doubt the empirically groundless idea that ruling populism may be a “corrective” to the shortcomings of democracy (13). The evidence is over- whelming. Decades of populist rule in Argentina have left that country’s people exposed to persistent political instability and economic crises. In 2001, Argentina defaulted on its debts and mass riots ensued. Greece was saved from default only by history’s biggest sovereign bailout. Even so, Greeks found their nation plunged into a spiral of political and economic troubles that still appear to have no exit. Venezuela, despite its arable land, mild climate, and vast oil reserves, has become the scene of a massive humanitarian crisis that threatens to destabilize the whole region as millions flee empty store shelves, a failed economy, ravaged social services, and social anomie. Hungary has stacked its courts, taken over its independent press, and driven out the Central European University. What is left of its democracy is being hollowed out, and the country has been targeted by the EU for formal criticism and possible sanctions, even as Orbán’s regime continues to provide a model of illiberalism for Eastern Europe and beyond. In Italy and Peru, populism sapped the liberal underpinnings of the political order, perhaps irreversibly. Neither country has a coherent party system. In each, moreover, society seems to be drawn to a would-be charismatic leader such as Matteo Salvini or (at least until her imprisonment) Keiko Fujimori.

With all this in mind, it is hard to be optimistic about the future of countries that have experienced populist rule. Is it, then, impossible to pull populist-ruled countries back from the illiberal brink? The only glimmer of hope among our cases comes from Ecuador. Even though the post-Correa liberalization occurred only recently, it shows that transitions from populist to liberal rule can take place. But to succeed, such transitions require a leader who is animated by pragmatism, has the determination to rely on institutions, and is able to turn a deaf ear to any siren song claiming that illiberalism is a better method of governing.

NOTES

1. I exclude Bolivia, where Evo Morales, an indigenous leader heading the leftist Movement to Socialism, has won three consecutive presidential elections since 2005. There are two reasons for excluding Bolivia: 1) the absence there of a liberal cultural and constitutional tradition dating from before Morales’s ascent to power; and 2) its unique ethnic composition, consisting of 37 distinct minority ethnic groups that amount to well over 60 percent of the total population. We do best to understand Bolivia as a case not of populism, but of Latin American nativism.

2. There are four important cases of this kind: Poland since 2015, the United States since 2017, Mexico since December 2018, and Brazil since January 2019.

3. For more theoretical detail see Takis S. Pappas, “Are Populist Leaders ‘Charis- matic’? The Evidence from Europe,” Constellations 23 (September 2016): 378–90.

4. The only partly deviant case in this respect is Hungary, where Orbán was among the cofounders of Fidesz, an initially liberal party. When he became determined to lead Fidesz from a liberal to a populist orientation, Orbán had to expel all liberal internal opposition, which he did during the 1993 party congress in Debrecen, Hungary.

5. Most notably, Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Giacomo Sani and Giovanni Sartori, “Polarization, Fragmentation and Competition in Western Democracies,” in Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change, Hans Daalder and Peter Mair, eds. (London: Sage, 1983).

6. A gravely ill Andreas Papandreou resigned the premiership in January 1996 before dying that June, but since it was only his failing health that drove him from power, it may fairly be said that he died in office.

7. For a more detailed analysis see Takis S. Pappas, “Why Greece Failed,” Journal of Democracy 24 (April 2013): 31–45.

8. From the rich corpus of works on chavismo, see in particular Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chávez, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

9. To take just one example, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon has said that he admires Viktor Orbán as a “hero” and “the most significant guy on the scene right now.” Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s,” New York Times, 9 March 2018.

10. Patrick Kingsley, “How Viktor Orbán Bends Hungarian Society to His Will,” New York Times, 27 March 2018.

11. Sargentini’s report is on the European Parliament’s website at https://tinyurl.com/ yb9um7g2.

12. See Carlos de la Torre, “Latin America’s Shifting Politics: Ecuador After Correa,” Journal of Democracy 29 (October 2018): 77–88.

13. See, for instance, Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds., Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), as well as countless articles in the popular press propagating the idea that populism is not necessarily bad for democratic politics.