Abstract
ABSTRACTMatias López and Juan Luna (2021) challenged my comparative analysis of populism’s threat to democracy, its reliance on institutional factors (coupled with conjunctural opportunities), and especially the inference about US democracy’s immunity to populist suffocation. However, their emphasis on structuralist and culturalist factors, which would suggest the vulnerability of the United States, is strikingly selective, theoretically unconvincing, and empirically problematic. López and Luna’s methodological improvement of my analysis does not alter the substantive findings or overturn my sanguine inference about US democracy’s likely resilience. Only their further modifications yield more pessimistic scenarios, but those adjustments stand on shaky theoretical and empirical ground. Indeed, the experiences of 2020–2021 corroborate my theory and its comparative lessons. The US institutional framework held firm and foiled the insistent attempts of President Trump and his most fervent followers to perpetuate the US populist in power. Consequently, US democracy continues to appear quite safe from populist strangulation.
Highlights
M y comprehensive analysis of populist governments in Europe and Latin America showed that the risk to liberal democracy was lower than many observers stirred up by Donald Trump’s stunning election had feared (Weyland 2020)
I theorized that personalistic plebiscitarian leadership suffocated democracy only when two types of conditions intersected: (1) when institutional weakness created room for maneuvering by personalistic leaders; and (2) when conjunctural opportunities, arising from severe and acute but resolvable crises or from hydrocarbon windfalls, allowed such leaders to obtain overwhelming support
COVID-19 provided an opportunity for only his—nonpopulist—successor
Summary
López and Luna (2021) criticize the institutionalist dimensions of my theory and call for the inclusion of cultural and structural factors that—they claim—make the United States significantly more vulnerable to democratic breakdown. In addition to not mentioning the serious questions surrounding inequality arguments, López and Luna seem to score the United States inaccurately. They claim to count “all cases with Gini >0.4 as...unequal” As with traditional values, the United States does not seem to suffer from the deep inequality that they declare as problematic In their structuralist analysis, López and Luna (2021) include domestic ethnic fractionalization; this factor (contrary to anti-immigration sentiment) rarely has been theorized and conjunctural opportunities—two factors that I did not choose but rather derived from the very definition of populism— appear unconvincing
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