How Populism Dies: Political Weaknesses of Personalistic Plebiscitarian leadership

To balance recent concerns about the threat that populism poses to liberal democracy, this paper examines the political weaknesses and hazards inherent in populist leadership, which foil many efforts to undermine and suffocate democracy. With its reliance on personalistic leadership and uninstitutionalized mass support, populism constitutes a risky political strategy that often fails. In their supreme self-confidence, populist leaders commonly make mistakes in dealing with the complexities of modern politics. As their performance is rocky, their non-institutional mechanisms for winning support through offers of bribery can easily turn fatal by triggering massive scandals. At the same time, populists’ zealous quest for autonomy makes their alliances precarious. As the “political establishment” that populists attack fights back, personalistic chief executives risk suffering irregular exits or evictions from office. In other cases, populism’s weaknesses prevent charismatic politicians from overcoming domestic institutional constraints or external political and economic pressures. Due to all of these problems and pitfalls, populist leaders have a substantially lower capacity to dismantle democracy than recent observers fear. In the contest between democracy and populism, democracy often wins out, as this analysis of Latin American and European experiences shows.