What Influence Does Populism Have on the Democratic Quality? A Quantitative Analysis of 18 Latin American States 1995-2009

This paper tries to examine the influence of populist actors in Latin-American countries on democratic quality building on qualitative and theoretical work, esp. Mudde and Rovira-Kaltwasser (2012). Generally, populist actors are assumed to have a negative impact on the democratic quality when they are in government as they degrade e.g. the system of checks and balances. On the other hand, populist actors should positively influence democratic quality when they are in the opposition where they function as a corrective. It is further assumed that the dimension of the effect is dependent on the consolidation of the democracy: the more consolidated a democracy is the less influence, positive and negative, populist actors have. Besides the evaluation, we seek to contribute to the current state of research using a multivariate OLS regression and data from 18 Latin-American countries between 1995 and 2009 to evaluate our hypotheses. Generally, the results support our arguments.