The Emergence and Revival of Charismatic Movements: Argentine Peronism and Venezuelan Chavismo by Caitlin Andrews-Lee

Abstract

We generally think of personalist political movements as shallow and fleeting. Without a programmatic political project and the formal organization to nurture and motivate adherents, these movements are expected to fade away, especially once the charismatic leader exits the scene. But although this pattern has often held, some charismatic movements somehow, puzzlingly persist. Argentina’s Peronist movement was founded in the 1940s and to this day, supporters hang portraits of Juan and Eva Perón on their walls. Hugo Chávez, who first won the presidency in 1998, continues to elicit deep loyalty from a substantial number of Venezuelans even after his death in 2013 and the country’s economic and social collapse.Andrews-Lee’s masterful new book explains how. She persuasively argues that personalist attachment to a charismatic leader—often borne of people’s search for a savior in times of crisis—can be a lasting source of individual social identity, even in the absence of a programmatic project or a party organization. But for a charismatic movement to survive, successors need to pick up the mantle of the original leader. Only those successors who manage both to tie themselves symbolically to the charismatic leader and to achieve impressive feats in office are able to reactivate those charismatic links. Few succeed.Andrews-Lee traces these dynamics specifically by studying Peronism and Chavismo closely. Survey data from Venezuela show the influence of charisma on attachments to Chavismo. Focus-group discussions offer fascinating insight into how followers think about both movements and the enduring bond that they have with their founding leader. Survey experiments fielded in both countries offer further validation that symbolic attachments to the movement can be re-activated.Andrews-Lee also studies the Argentine and Venezuelan cases over time, relying on both secondary sources and her own interviews with elite actors. She shows that putative successors to the original charismatic leader sometimes fail to pick up the mantle of the movement. Cases in point are Perón’s second wife Isabel, who followed him in office in 1974; Antonio Cafiero, the Peronist party leader who failed to secure its presidential nomination in 1988; and Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s anointed successor. More successful heirs include Carlos Menem, who defeated Cafiero and served two terms as president, and later presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández. All of them tied themselves to the Peronist icons and brought the country out of fresh economic crises.The book offers a compelling portrait of, and plenty of insights into, both the psychology of individual attachments to charismatic leaders and the politics of the movements that they foster. Andrews-Lee’s methodology, combining quantitative and qualitative data, is a genuine strength and a testament to her efforts to tackle an important and thorny research question. She makes a forceful case that charismatic attachments are different from programmatic ones, but her contention that charismatic movements like Peronism and Chavismo survived even in the absence of programmatic platforms is likely overstated. Peronism emerged as a political project of economic nationalism, a programmatic agenda widely supported by the urban working class. Its links to organized labor were part of its dna. Although Peronism was certainly personalist and heterogeneous, Peronist voters disapproved of Menem’s neoliberal turn. Indeed, Menem campaigned on a very different political platform than the one he pursued in office and faced tremendous opposition from his Peronist supporters both on the streets and in Congress during his first years in office. For a time, Menem’s policies were able to stabilize the economy and generate growth, for which voters eventually rewarded him at the ballot box. But surveys showed fewer and fewer Argentines identified with Peronism, and organized labor splintered in the process.Chávez’s 1998 campaign was economically moderate, but his popularity soared when he launched massive redistributive programs and subsidies for basic goods in the early 2000s, winning him solid support from the less-affluent Venezuelans who benefited most. Despite its many failures, Maduro’s Venezuela maintains similar economic policies. Both Peronism and Chavismo are certainly charismatic movements, but they are not without programmatic content. Peronism and Chavismo attracted a mix of charismatic, programmatic, and organizational attachments. Scholars, particularly in political science, tend to discount the role of charismatic attachments. The Emergence and Revival of Charismatic Movements reminds us that those symbolic attachments are a critical part of understanding these political movements and their longevity.