Pluralist Points: Populism vs. Pluralism

In this episode of the Pluralist Points podcast, Ben Klutsey, the executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Kurt Weyland, the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, about the rise of populism. They discuss what factors contribute to populism, how worried we should be about its rise, why populism leads to authoritarianism, and much more.

BEN KLUTSEY: Today I’m speaking with Dr. Kurt Weyland. Kurt is currently the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests focus on social policy, policy diffusion, democratization, authoritarian rule and populism. In addition, he’s the author and editor of many books and articles, but today we will be talking about his latest book, “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism.” Yes, that’s the book. Really a great book, and thanks for writing it. Kurt, welcome to “Pluralist Points.”

KURT WEYLAND: Thank you for having me. I’ve been interested in talking to you.

Populism Rising?

KLUTSEY: Since the Brexit vote in 2016, there’s been a lot of talk about rising populism. You’re the expert, and you follow this consistently. Is populism on the rise?

WEYLAND: Populism is on the rise. Not as dramatically as people think, but there has been an increase in several regions of the world. Even in Western Europe, they are advancing slowly. In Latin American countries, populism has long had a strong presence, but they keep going and producing new variants. Then in Eastern Europe, there’s also—and other regions of the world, Modi in India, I think there is a gradual advance.

People think of this massive global wave, and I think that’s exaggerated. But there is a gradual advance, both in the electoral strength of populists in reaching government office and also in, I think, the damage they do to democracy. They’ve become a little more successful, partly because they inspire and learn from each other, so the problem for liberal democracy is increasing. As I said, not as dramatically as many people fear, but we need to be alert with this.

KLUTSEY: Is this mainly due to economic dislocation, cultural tensions? What do you attribute this rise in populism to?

WEYLAND: It’s hard to say, I think. There have been interminable debates, and the different analyses—some show more of the economic side, others show more of the cultural side. I think that both of those types of factors matter because with globalization, increasing inequality in a bunch of countries, there are more and more people who are left behind and who are, for that reason, discontented. I also do believe that really quite quick advance of liberal values across the world has provoked a certain cultural backlash.

I think there is a third factor that accounts for the gradual rise of populism, which is that our modern democracies have to deal with so many hypercomplex problems that for common people it’s harder and harder to understand what’s going on. That, in some sense, provides an opening for populists to say, “Look at all these establishment politicians. Look at all these experts. They tell you all this complicated stuff, and they haven’t resolved a thing, but I have the solution.”

Think of U.S. immigration, a phenomenally complex issue area that hasn’t been resolved. Here came Trump in 2015, ’16, “All you need to do is build a wall, right?” People are like, “Oh, wow, the guy must be a genius.” I think that is a third factor that provides space for populists to draw citizens who are just baffled by the phenomenal complexity of modern politics with their simplistic slogans and exaggerated promises.

Life Cycle of Populism

KLUTSEY: Does populism have a life cycle? Is there a place where it starts and then it crystallizes at a certain point and then eventually declines? Or it crystallizes and then is sustained over a long period of time? Do you think about it in terms of life cycles?

WEYLAND: You mean populism as a political phenomenon? You mean individual populist experiences? Because in my view, individual populist experiences by nature have a life cycle. By my definition, populism revolves around personalistic and plebiscitarian leadership. These are not organized movements. They don’t usually have disciplined political parties, the populists, and have reliable support. So they rise, but they can also fall kind of dramatically.

Sooner or later, a populist leader—they initially campaign by being outsiders, but the longer they’re in government, they’re not outsiders anymore. The longer they’re in government, often incompetence and corruption shows, so there tends to be a natural life cycle of individual populists. The problem is that populism is very flexible and they’re very savvy, and they can rise based on a great variety of different issues, problems, representation deficits.

We see that especially in the Latin American experiences because we’ve had populism for decades, different versions. Populism, as such—even if individual experiences rise and fall, populism, as such, pops up again. In Latin America, there have been a number of occasions. After the military regimes of the ’60s and ’70s, the scholars thought populism is finished, and—poof—it pops up again. There were right-wing neoliberal populists in the ’90s, and when they were exhausted, people thought, well, that was it; neoliberalism would preclude populism. Here—poof—comes Hugo Chávez and has a different version of populism.

After that falls, with the end of the global commodities boom, poof, you have Bolsonaro and you have Milei and you have—the individual experiences have a life cycle. Populism as a movement has more power of popping up. It’s not persistence, but they are savvy, and they find a way or the opening that allows new versions to rise.

Defining Populism

KLUTSEY: Now, let’s double-click on the definition for a second. You used the term “personalistic plebiscitarianism.” Most people, when they think about populism, I think they’re thinking about an anti-elite phenomenon. Why do you pick this term in particular? Can you unpack it for us?

WEYLAND: No, absolutely. Many people think of populism in terms of the discourse and the rhetoric that populist leaders have. Populist leaders essentially pit the pure, authentic people that have been neglected and excluded against these corrupt, selfish elites. They claim that they have the cause of the people in mind in finally giving them their rightful space in politics and whatever, but that is the big deception of populism because populism does not empower the people. Virtually every case revolves around a powerful, domineering leader. That is the axis of populism.

I think the definitions and understandings that emphasize the people versus the elite, they fall for this populist deception. They fall for the promise, “Reempower the people,” but that promise is used to empower the leader in every single case. Hearing people like, “Oh, Hugo Chávez was a left-winger, and he created all these participatory institutions, and he empowered the Venezuelan people.” Nonsense. He made all the decisions.

I think if you really want to understand populism as a political scientist, not the rhetoric and not the discourse, you need to understand that the core political phenomenon of populism is this leadership. And it’s leadership that—these very overbearing, strong leaders who think that they have this phenomenal prowess and capacities to do things that your regular professional politician can’t do. I call that personalistic because it’s anti-institutional, it’s outside of institutions. It was the person of the leader, “I, Trump, can do these things.”

Then the other feature is that they do not base their support on organizations, on intermediaries, on established parties, but they have this direct appeal to the people in this plebiscitarian way: “I’m a representative of the people and I reach them directly. I bypass the parties and the intermediaries.” Nowadays, they do it by social media; before, they did it by TV. Juan Perón did it by convoking a million people in front of the presidential palace, and you speak to people directly.

That has features that we can talk about later that characterize populism, but the crucial thing is, if you want to understand populism, and especially if you want to understand populism’s impact on democracy, you need to really put the central focus on the leaders.

KLUTSEY: That’s interesting. It’s personalistic. It’s about the strong, domineering leader, and they are sustained by a plebiscitarian fervor—the people, the masses.

WEYLAND: Direct appeal to the people. Hugo Chávez had this TV program for like six, eight hours every Sunday. He was in people’s living room talking to them as if he were their friend. You want to have this direct connection. Trump in the first government, with his tweet talks constantly, people were constantly glued: “What’s the new tweet from Trump?” You have this direct connection, but it’s organizationally flimsy. These are your followers, but they could unfollow or cancel you if they wanted to.

What do you have to do to maintain and build your followership? You have to intensify that linkage. You have to make it emotional. You have to make it such that these people are—I don’t know how to say this—seduced, glued to hearing from you. How do you do that? Essentially by depicting your adversaries as enemies, as nefarious forces, and so you transform politics from democratic competition into a war, confrontation, polarization.

What you essentially try to do is, you try to provoke—rally around the flag. “Here are the bad elites who are trying to exploit you and take advantage of you. I am protecting you, so all circle the wagons around me because I need your support to promote your cause.” You see how populism, because of the flimsiness of its support base, that in principle it’s precarious. You have to supercharge it. You have to make it really fervent, and that leads to the tension for confrontation, for constantly provoking, for always picking fights. That makes populism then also so deleterious for civil discourse, for compromise, for what we think is the crucial factor of pluralist, liberal, democratic politics.

KLUTSEY: You mentioned the term there: polarization. I think that populism by its very nature is polarizing because it engages in this us-versus-them rhetoric and actual behavior.

WEYLAND: Correct. It’s not like, “I give you a programmatic offer in the competition, and let’s debate and let’s discuss,” but, “I’m the incarnation of the good and they are the incarnation of the evil, so we have to fight them. We have to lock them up. We have to drive them off the arena. If we pull a few tricks to skew the playing field, to infringe on norms, that’s what you do when you’re in a battle for life and death.” And you see how this goes downhill.

Democracy’s Resilience

KLUTSEY: Right. Now, populism oftentimes is trying to counter liberal pluralism, as you say, or the democratic system. What makes the system so resilient against populism? What are some of the institutional or cultural factors and norms that help to maintain liberal pluralism in the face of populist challenges?

WEYLAND: I think it’s partly the old Madisonian idea, the self-interest of other politicians who don’t want to get pushed to the side and who therefore balance and constrain and limit what a populist leader wants to do. They don’t just want to be pushed aside by this, so partly it’s self-interest and institutional design fragmentation. You have a checks-and-balances system, and the courts have a certain task. They’re not just going to concede to some populist result. Ultimately, it rests on, I think, the appreciation that many people have for their freedom, for their liberty, for their rights of participation.

Also, I think what you see is very important, is it tends to be that populists find more support among less educated and less support among educated sectors because for people like us, this populist style—they’re full of themselves, they’re crass. Would you want to own Mar-a-Lago? The whole performance that they have, the cussing, the insulting and the corruption that goes hand in hand very often with this personalism and the fawning loyalists with whom they surround themselves.

You’re like, “Ugh.” It’s almost an aesthetic thing. The Argentine educated middle class, they couldn’t stand Carlos Menem because he was crass and liked blonde supermodels and red sports cars. If you’re an educated person, you’re like, “Ugh.” All these things, I think, come together: self-interest, commitment to democratic norms and then an aversion to the populist style, these populist performances.

KLUTSEY: It seems to me that you’re saying competition is the thing that eventually is able to counter populism.

WEYLAND: Very important. Yes, absolutely.

KLUTSEY: Interesting.

WEYLAND: As long as institutions hold and they can prevent a populist leader from skewing the playing field too badly. In European countries, they suffer electoral defeats like Poland. In the Polish case, that right-wing PiS party looked like they had an electoral victory wrapped up in 2023, and they lost. Modi in India, people thought, “Oh my God, he is sailing to a third term.” Bang, got one on the nose.

In Latin American countries, it’s very hard to defeat populist incumbents in elections, but there are other ways to contain them. A whole bunch of them have lost office through irregular ousters, mass protests, the scandal blows up in their face. Their personalistic rule suddenly implodes when there is some glaring scandal that emerges. There are ways, if the opposition manages to contain them, manages to wear them down.

KLUTSEY: In your book, in a third of the cases that you studied, you show that populism did a lot of damage and actually did survive. Maybe we can’t be too optimistic about democracy resilience.

WEYLAND: No. In that book, I looked at 40 cases, and of the 40 cases, seven actually really destroyed democracy. A bunch of other ones did temporary damage to democracy. But in seven cases, populism really—I use the metaphors of suffocating and strangling because it’s a gradual process. It’s not like the old military coups. Usually, it’s not like boom, but it’s like gradual, gradual, gradual, slippery slope.

More and more power concentration, more and more corrosion of institutional safeguards, and at some point or other—think of Orbán in Hungary. He did everything almost completely in formal, legal ways, but sooner or later you go down. In seven cases, that happened. Then of course, what I do is I look at what other conditions—why democracy was destroyed in those seven cases and not in the other 33.

That’s how I come up with this argument that the populist destruction of democracy does not only require a certain preexisting institutional weakness, but it also requires that at the same time, these populist assailants benefit from unusual conjunctual opportunities. In the case of the Latin American left-wingers like Chávez, the global commodities pool gave them a huge windfall of resources with which they could literally buy support. If you buy support and you have 70% popularity, you’re strangling democracy.

In the case of right-wingers in Europe and in Latin America, it was in some sense the opposite: acute, severe, but resolvable crisis like hyperinflation. Hyperinflation devastates the population there. In despair, here comes a populist, where the boldness of a populist leader imposes a stabilization program that is painful. But if that succeeds in dissolving and bringing inflation down like Fujimori did in Peru, they are the hero.

To go beyond the details of the arguments, the basic point is, populist leaders can destroy democracy only when they benefit from exogenous, given, objective special conditions. They can’t create these conditions. Only if, in some sense, a windfall falls in their lap, only if they encounter a crisis and they can manage it. Those are exceptional. Those are unusual. If you are president and there is no windfall and there is no crisis, in my finding, you can do some pushing and shoving and do some damage like in Poland, but sooner or later, you’re not succeeding in strangling democracy.

False Populists

KLUTSEY: Have there been some false alarms, like leaders who came in with a populist flavor and ended up not being populist at all?

WEYLAND: No. Usually, a populist is a populist. But what you see is this, and I’m not sure it’s a false alarm or somehow the—

KLUTSEY: Moderating?

WEYLAND: Think, for example, there was one very clear alarm that was very justified, which was with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who was a real hard-right—you could just see the guy’s autocratic inclinations and aspirations if he had had his way. But Brazilian democracy survived. Was it a false alarm? No. I think it was in some sense like, “Whoa, we have to pay attention. We have to be alert.”

I think there’s false alarm—and that’s why the book has the subtitle “Countering Global Alarmism”—is that people and observers think—they overestimate the capacity of populists to do damage to democracy and destroy democracy. You have all these books like, “Oh, my God, with the rise of populism, democracies face such a hard time.”

You have people now, I think—I haven’t seen it yet, but I think my colleague and friend Steve Levitsky, “Trump is undoing American democracy.” You had—what was his name?—I think Robert Kagan wrote this thing in 2023, “The U.S. is headed toward authoritarian ruler.” Whoa. That is so exaggerated. The populists are bad news if they get their way. The logic of populism is power concentrating. It’s pushing up against checks and balances. The logic is expansive and does damage if it can unfold, but democracy is significantly stronger than people think.

There are counter forces. Institutions often hold. Even weak institutions like in Latin America and Eastern Europe often hold. The other thing is, what I think people underestimate—these populists have their own weaknesses. The fact that they surround themselves with loyalists and they don’t listen to experts, they make a lot of mistakes.

Some leaders manage to overcome serious crises. Other populist leaders face serious crises and they fail. Poof, here they go down. What I mentioned, this plebiscitarian mass support, the flimsy precarious base of populism. You can be a hero now, and your popularity can plummet. Hugo Chávez was reelected with majority in 2000, and he did such clear attacks on democracy that by 2002, 2003, his popularity had plummeted. Populism has this volatility. You can be hero and you can be a villain. A whole bunch of them fall by the wayside.

KLUTSEY: Now, you mentioned Chávez. His successor, Maduro, you wouldn’t categorize as populist, right?

WEYLAND: No, because personalistic plebiscitarian. Maduro is a dud. Maduro is a bore. Think of somebody who could be less charismatic. That’s the reason that he always invokes Chávez. He needs Chávez’s glow because he himself has none.

KLUTSEY: That’s simple authoritarianism, basically.

WEYLAND: I actually wrote an article about that because what you see is the following: Hugo Chávez, he had tremendous magnetism. He had genuine mass support. It was undemocratic, but he had majoritarian support, so Hugo Chávez didn’t have to be very repressive.

Chávez dies, Maduro takes over, and it’s like, “Oh, how am I going to hold this thing together? I have no magnetism. I have much less genuine support.” What do you need to do? The opposition is like, “Oh, this guy is much weaker. Let’s challenge him.” “Then what am I going to do?” Poof, you crack down.

Ranking Democracies

KLUTSEY: I see. Now, in the book you talk about how some of the indices that rank democracies are skewed because scholars tend to be left of center and are more lenient with some of the left-leaning populist leaders. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Are we missing some of these aspects of populism or when populism emerges, because we are not looking at it from the right frame?

WEYLAND: You see, these rankings tend to be fairly tough on right-wingers like Orbán. Orbán in Hungary, I would say, yes, by now, this is a competitive authoritarian regime because he’s very firmly entrenched. He gerrymandered; he skewed the electoral playing field. He was not very repressive, but he was considered competitive authoritarian.

Evo Morales in Bolivia, who is a left-winger, Evo Morales pushed a new . . . Orbán got a supermajority. He had a new constitution done completely legally—undemocratic, but completely legally. He didn’t violate a legal norm. Evo Morales had less of a majority, so he pushed a new constitution through a constituent assembly, partly by literally excluding the opposition. They put armed people around the assembly and didn’t let the opposition enter.

Then they negotiated. In the negotiation, Morales promised that he would only run for one more reelection. As soon as he was more firmly in the saddle, he literally laughed at them and said, “You fools, you believed me? Of course I’m not going to.” He, in the meantime—half the opposition leaders—he did what Donald Trump promised and didn’t do: He locked them up or he drove them into exile. He destroyed the opposition. Then after he got reelected for his third term, he, of course, was insatiable enough to want a fourth term. He lost the referendum and then got the supreme court that was government dependent to concoct some funky ruling that it was a human right to be reelected.

We then still didn’t classify that regime as competitive authoritarian. What does it take? What does it take for a left-winger? Orbán did, in some sense, much less and was considered competitive authoritarian. Morales had done much more, and they were like, “Woo.”

Strategies for Sustaining Pluralism

KLUTSEY: In your research, have you found any strategies or approaches that policymakers or groups in civil society can use to sustain pluralism when populists gain power?

WEYLAND: This is a very difficult question because, in some sense, what I mentioned, populists destroy democracy, when they benefit from objectively given conjunctional opportunities, like there is a huge windfall of resources, the president can spend freely or there is this huge crisis. If you resolve it, like Bukele did in El Salvador—in some sense, you have this suffocating gang violence—he just locked up tens of thousands of people.

In the perception of the population, he extinguished the violence. They feel free to play in the park again, whatever. Given that these conditions are objectively given, the opposition in some sense can’t do that much in those cases. You’re not going to take the oil windfall away from Hugo Chávez, who can just spend. You are not going to take the success against hyperinflation and the Shining Path guerrillas away from Fujimori, who is the hero and has 80% approval. What are you doing against 80% approval? Nothing.

The opposition’s chances in the really dangerous cases—I think the opposition’s chances are, by nature, limited. What are you going to do against Bukele right now? His popularity has started to come down a little, but he is not defeatable. As opposition, you want to mark presence, you want to criticize, but you’re not going to dislodge that guy anytime soon.

It’s in the intermediate cases, when a populist does reasonably well but doesn’t benefit from these exceptional opportunities, cases like Carlos Menem in Argentina, who lowered hyperinflation but he didn’t have another big success. The institutions held and you maintain and you assert your rights in congress, and you invoke the courts and you criticize him with the media.

Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, or then later Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina—in those settings, opposition action is very important. You use, as much as you can use, established institutions. You also try to use your strength in civil society, but protests can be more iffy because if they lead to violence, that is like, “Look at the opposition. They are chaotic. I need to impose law and order.” That’s more of a somewhat risky strategy. First and foremost, the stronger the institutions are, the more you want to rely on them and the more you can rely on them to contain and limit.

Populism’s Positives?

KLUTSEY: Now, oftentimes when we hear “populism,” we think of it negatively, and perhaps rightly so. Are there aspects of populism that are positive? Is it surfacing some information that is important for us to be aware of and to address? I think in the beginning, you talked about the rise of populism being a result of certain complex problems that we see in society. I was wondering whether there are some aspects of it that we should be paying attention to.

WEYLAND: Look, this is a very good and difficult issue. I wouldn’t say that populism has a lot of positive sides, but populism is a sign of trouble that the liberal democratic forces should take seriously and need to address. Populism emerges because a whole bunch of people are discontented. A whole bunch of discontent you can’t deal with because there is too much going on and too many demands and whatever.

If this grows, you need to do something or other to try to address it: economic dislocation with compensation, social measures, facilitating education. The cultural backlash—maybe by just holding a little on the advance of all these cultural values and reassuring the more traditional sectors that you’re not just pushing them into a system that they don’t like. I don’t know how you address this problem with the complexity of modern life because opening up participation is difficult. When you think of it, in general, populists benefit from representational deficits, issues that the established politicians don’t want to address.

Now, there are issues that the established politicians have good reasons not to address. When I grew up in Europe, after every heinous crime, there was like, “We shouldn’t have the death penalty.” You might not want to touch that one. Think about something like immigration. For reasons that we might all disagree with, a whole bunch of people are worried about immigration. Of course, it’s a paradoxical demand because every single advanced, industrialized country needs immigrants because they don’t reproduce in sufficient numbers, and their population decline needs to be compensated. You’re like, “What’s wrong with you people?”

It so happens that people are worried about immigration, but I think they’re worried especially about what people call illegal immigration, where they think the states and governments have lost control, and people just come and come and come. Like in this so-called refugee crisis of 2015, just a million people pressing in, and you can’t keep them out.

Now, that is not an issue that the establishment wanted to deal with for all kinds of reasons. Somehow or other, you need to do something because if the discontent keeps growing and festering, all you do is provide more opportunities for these populists to make headway. In that sense, populism is a sign of trouble.

I think the establishment politicians, liberal democrats are well advised to pay attention to this and see what can be done. Can we somehow regulate immigration more? Can we do something to make it harder to come in in illegal ways? Can we foster immigration that people would find more palatable? We are going to identify professions that we need—we need nurses, we need teachers—so we are going to go out and recruit these people in a more proactive way, rather than seeming to be overwhelmed by people just pressing in. I think something has to be done.

And populism doesn’t have the solutions. As I told you, Donald Trump is absolutely right. The immigration system in the United States is broken. Everybody knows it. It’s completely dysfunctional, it’s chaotic and whatever. He’s right, but building a wall is not going to resolve these problems.

That’s why I’m saying populism doesn’t have a positive side, because they don’t provide a solution. But it is a sign of trouble, alert to something brewing, something going on, something that needs addressing somehow or other in ways that are more rational, that are more systematic, that are more long-term perspective than what the populists with their simplistic promises advocate. Something has to be done.

Inspiration for the Book

KLUTSEY: I’m curious, as a political scientist scholar who has been thinking a lot about democracy and all of these issues, what compelled you, or should I say inspired you, to write this particular book in this moment?

WEYLAND: This topic of populism has been on my radar screen. I’ve thought and written about it for literally 35 years. When I was doing my dissertation research in Brazil, there was the rise of a right-winger that seemed to be populist, and that was strange, Fernando Collor de Mello. I followed this for the longest time, but I’ve never really written a book about it. I paid attention to Fujimori, Menem and Chávez and all these characters. I had a lot of research done along the way that I've never . . .

Then what motivated me to do this was the outpouring of books of doom and gloom that started especially with Trump’s election. As I say, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote a wonderful book. It’s an excellent book, but it’s too dark. A whole bunch of other people like, “Oh, my God, doom and gloom.” When there was one book like this after the other, what started to bother me is, I think there is an incentive to write doom and gloom because bad news sells. If you can tell people, “Trump is a fascist,” they’re all bent out of shape.

I thought, “Okay, now let’s look at what actually happens.” Yes, populism is a problem, as I’ve seen. But I’ve also seen along the way, many populists fail and don’t succeed, and many democracies survive. Let’s provide some balance based on comprehensive, systematic research. We need to—how should I say that?—lower the temperature a little, lower this, “Oh my God, populism is just the end of democracy.” I can say it in a personal way, it started getting on my nerves.

Now, look at this. You see how the human mind works. I think the cases in which populism does a ton of damage, they are on people’s mind. That distorts our judgment. I think when populists fail—like Bolsonaro didn’t get reelected in Brazil—people pay a little attention, then it drops off the radar screen. When in Poland they fail and don’t get reelection, there isn’t enough attention to that. I think people’s perception is skewed. “Ooh, there’s Chávez who did it. Oh, there’s Erdoğan who did it. Oh, there’s Bukele who did it.” We also need to keep in mind the many other cases.

Now a lot of these people are forgotten. When you look at my book, there are case studies of people who—Bucaram of Ecuador, Serrano of Guatemala, Castillo of Peru, that were blips, episodes, and they’re forgotten. But in analytical terms, those are important cases too. We need to see, not only where do they [the populists] really destroy democracy, but also where was it beginning but it was stopped. It was contained. They themselves failed.

These are not the cases that—people, they should find them fascinating, but they haven’t drawn the attention. They’re not in people’s memory. Our whole perception is distorted. The book tries to balance this. The book tries to put it in perspective.

Countering Global Alarmism

KLUTSEY: Now, as we wrap this up, I want to go back to the title of the book, and I’m curious about what your call to action is. You’re basically saying that there is maybe too much alarmism about populism. The subtitle says, “Countering Global Alarmism.” What’s the best way to counter global alarmism? What should be our approach as we see populism emerge?

WEYLAND: I think when populist leaders rise in the political and electoral arena, we should try to see which ones of the grievances that they feed on we can address and diminish and win people back—or at least make sure that they don’t win more and more support, what I said about the representation deficits. I think we have to be willing to jettison some of our own predilections and preferences to accommodate people who we don’t like that much. But we don’t want to fall to the populists.

I think that is important, and it is painful, and people don’t like doing it, and that’s why it’s done too little. I think that’s the only way of stemming the advance of populism in the electoral arena: Make it harder for them to reach government office. When they have reached government office, I think really my first recommendation would be try to use established institutions.

Now, there are settings where the institutions are so weak that you might have to resort to other means. There protests, there civil society are indispensable because if you have an institutional framework that’s crumbling left and right, you can’t contain them—checks and balances. It depends very much on the specific situation. I mentioned populists are savvy. They use specific opportunities in specific countries. There isn’t one common recipe. They have a nose for what’s brewing. Where are the grievances? Where are the unaddressed problems? They seize on them.

I think the liberal democratic opposition has to be equally savvy. What is it that they’re using? They’re using this grievance here, they’re using that grievance there, they’re using this trick here, they’re making alliances with this over there. Or for example, in terms of institutional containment, it obviously depends very much on the institutional setup of the specific country.

In the United States, one very important mechanism of containment is federalism. It’s an additional safeguard, in addition to the checks and balances at the federal level. Where you have a unitary state, like El Salvador, you don’t have that. You have fewer lines of defense. It depends very much.

Parliamentary system, different thing from presidential system. Presidential system: clearer separation of powers, you can contain. Parliamentarianism: more you work in the party system because many of the populist leaders who rise in parliamentary systems, they’re not even majorities; they have coalitions. You want to work on that and see whether you can undermine the coalition.

KLUTSEY: Is there one that is more effective against populism, or it doesn’t really matter?

WEYLAND: No, this is different because traditionally there’s been this long-standing argument that presidentialism is more dangerous. You would think there would be especially propitious for populism because presidents directly elected [have] domineering, personalistic leadership. One result of my book is, I don’t find that big a difference because you see that in parliamentary systems, populist leaders have also risen. They have also destroyed democracy.

In some sense, the attenuated separation of powers in the parliamentary system—Orbán, if you win a majority, and especially if you win a supermajority, you have in some sense a much more open path to concentrating power, to weakening checks and balances. Whereas with the president, there is more separation of powers. Overall, I think in terms of the risk to democracy, overall, I think it’s a wash.

Both systems are equal strengths and weaknesses, but they’re different. In the presidential system, the institutional separation of powers is more of an obstacle for a populist. In the parliamentary system, it’s the party coalition that often they have to hold together. Think, for example, people like, “Oh, my God, Geert Wilders won the election in Holland,” 24% of the seats in parliament, finally managed to cobble together a coalition where he isn’t even the prime minister. How much damage is he going to do?

KLUTSEY: Kurt, this has been an insightful conversation. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. The book is called “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism.” Thank you.

WEYLAND: Thank you for having me. It was very interesting for me too.