Populism and Civic Culture: Insights from Latin America

Based on the concept of Civic Culture, the aim of this paper is to understand how the political discourse of populist leaders affects citizens’ orientations towards the political system. Latin America offers not just some of the most representative cases of populism, but also offers negative cases or non-occurrence of populism. Using the comparative method of cases, this paper looks for differences between two Latin American countries in order to provide clues about the causes of populism. Firstly, the study analyzes the content of political discourses of two presidents in Latin America: Rafael Correa and Jose Mujica. The former considered as a case of populist government and the latter considered as a case of non-occurrence of populism. This discourse analysis reveals two aspects of the populist language: the exaltation of the leader characteristics, and the loss of real participation of citizens in political decisions. In other words, political discourses of populist leaders undermine the relation between citizens and institutions, and reinforce the relation between citizens and leaders instead. This kind of relation was called ‘Civic Culture of Subject’ (Almond & Verba, 1963). Secondly, in order to measure the effects of populism the study compares citizens’ attitudes towards democracy, institutions and leaders in their countries before and during the president’s terms. The data has been taken from the Latin America Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), and from Latinobarometer Corporation. Changes in citizens’ attitudes could reveal the impact of populist frames developed in political discourses by the leaders. Therefore, the causes of populism could be located in the relation between political discourses and attitudes.