Teresa Kramarz and Donald Kingsbury – The Limits of Populism as Causal Explanation

Abstract

This chapter introduces Latin American populism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the first section we examine economic, political, and critical approaches to populism’s relationship with liberal democracy, a common concern throughout the literature on the topic. These approaches, we argue, explicitly or implicitly carry a teleological and ultimately Eurocentric bias of “democratization” that understands populism as a pathological condition of underdeveloped peoples and places. Among other problematic attributes, these accounts miss the interdependencies between populism and extractivist state formations. Extractivist states, we argue, better explain the sort of democratic accountability gaps that engender populist reactions. In the second section, we explore in greater detail how ostensibly populist sequences relate to political and ecological accountability. The chapter concludes with a call for rethinking populism along several dimensions and as nested within the broader context of extractivism.