Steven Levitsky is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He specializes in comparative and Latin American politics, with an interest in political parties and political regimes. Recent research interests include the causes and consequences of institutional weakness, informal institutions, and the dynamics of competitive authoritarianism in the post-Cold War era. He is author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and co-editor of Argentine Politics: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (Penn State, 2005) and Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2006).
Hugo Chavez, current leader of Venezuela.
HIR: In the past several years, it seems there has been a trend in the rise of populist and leftist leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Daniel Ortega. Is the current rise in leftist leaders populist in nature, or is it of a different nature altogether?
Levitsky: It depends largely on how you define populist. I treat populism as a political phenomenon; a phenomenon in which you get considerable mass mobilization from above, usually by a single fairly charismatic leader that mobilizes people against an entire established elite.
Peron, back in the 1940s, was a classic example of populism. Hugo Chavez today is a classic example of populism. I don’t think there is a definition in the world that wouldn’t define Hugo Chavez as populist. However, Evo Morales is less clear. Evo Morales comes from a grassroots movement that mobilized people against the established elite. In this case, he is quite left-of-center, but this doesn’t have the “from above” component that most people, at least in political science, would define as populism. I have a colleague at the University of Texas that identified Morales’ movement as an example of “ethno-populism,” a partially indigenously based movement against the established elite. So certainly, Morales has been identified as a populist, but his position is really unclear. Ortega, as well, comes from an established political party with a lot of grassroots support. He is a bit more personalist than the Sandanistas used to be, but whereas Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez came in and threw out the entire political elite, Ortega is very much part of the political elite now. So there is some sense that he is not populist.
There are other center-left governments in Latin America that have come to power down south in Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile. Those governments are clearly not populist; they are basically socially democratic. They are left-of-center, more moderate than the populist governments, and clearly not populist.
HIR: What do you think are the main origins and motivations of the current “populist” movement where it is occurring? Is it a result of the last twenty to thirty years of political oppression, or are there economic reasons that may cause what is happening?
Levitsky: It’s just the opposite of political oppression. The left is coming to power in Latin America because of democracy. Latin America has predominately been democratic for the last quarter century. Thirty-five to forty years ago, there were military coups against left-wing governments. The party in power in Chile today was overthrown in 1973. The military gained power in Uruguay in part to fight the folks that are now governing Uruguay. The party in power in Argentina today was overthrown by the military in 1976. And there is no question that had Lula in Brazil been elected in the 1980s, he probably would have been overthrown by a military coup. It’s the consolidation of democracy that is allowing the left to come to power peacefully in Latin America, not a response to repression.
Nobody has quite figured out the exact single cause of this extraordinary wave of elections of left-of-center governments. I would say that one big cause, if we had to identify a general factor, is the economic crisis that hit Latin America between 1998 and 2002. During the 1990s, everybody in Latin America, almost without exception, carried out what are called “Washington Consensus” economic policies: pro-market and pro-United States economic policies. So the opposition was the left during the 1990s in many countries because the governments, whether it was a right-wing party or a left-wing party behaving like a right-wing party, were behaving like right-wing governments. What happened beginning in 1997, during the Asian Financial crisis, was that Latin America sunk into one of its worst five-year periods ever. And what people do when poverty is up, unemployment is up, growth is virtually nil throughout the region, and crime is up, is to throw the incumbents out. The incumbents were right-of-center and the opposition virtually everywhere was the left. That’s what voters voted for in the years following 1998: the opposition. The incumbents lost. That is a boring explanation, but I think it may be the most important explanation.
A second explanation centers on US policy. This is much less important than the economic crisis, but in the 1990s, the United States was relatively popular in Latin America. That has changed dramatically for a variety of reasons in part because the United States is seen as neglecting Latin America and Latin American interests on trade, immigration, etc. The big whammy was the invasion of Iraq, which was incredibly unpopular to almost everyone in Latin America.
So it is pretty difficult to exactly gage what the factors were, but there has been a huge shift in public opinion against the United States. This shift makes it more politically attractive to take a nationalist anti-United States position. In the 2006-2007 elections, it was an electable position. It worked for Kirchner in Argentina, it worked for Chavez in Venezuela, it worked for Morales in Bolivia, it worked for Humala in Peru, and it worked for Correa in Ecuador.
HIR: Compared with previous populist movements of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s, how is the current movement similar, or different?
Levitsky: One big difference is that most of the populist movements of the 1930s and 1940s were based on organized labor. Labor movements were emerging and they were a major component of the populist coalitions that supported Cardenas in Mexico, Vargas in Brazil, Peron in Argentina, de la Torre in Peru, and the Democratic Action in Venezuela. Today, organized labor is a shell, a shadow of what it used to be. In fact, Hugo Chavez has attacked labor organizations in Venezuela. Correa wasn’t particularly backed by labor movements and Morales was backed to some degree, but not that much. Now, it is a much more heterogeneous, fragmented, often informal sector base; a mix of the unemployed, people who sell things in the streets, etc. It’s still the poor, but it’s not an organized base the way it was in the 1930s and 1940s.
