Democracy and Populist Plutocracy

From the 1990s onwards, some of the richest men in the world have entered politics, promoting a deep transformation of the field of politics itself and an erosion of the boundaries between politics and the economy. Some of these leaders became prime ministers or presidents of the republic in their respective countries: Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Sebastián Piñera in Chile, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, Igor Matovič in Slovakia, Bidzina Ivanishvili in Georgia, Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko in Ukraine, and, obviously, Donald Trump in the USA. We aim to explain both the experiences of such leaders and the forms of government they have attempted to achieve through the concepts of ‘populist plutocrats’ and ‘populist plutocracy’. In other words, this study is devoted to analysing the new phenomenon of populist plutocracy, its meaning, and its effects on liberal democracies in which it creeps in. In doing so, we will first focus on the differences that can be found between three similar and closely intertwined forms of government: plutocracy, demagogic plutocracy, and populist plutocracy. We will then address the question of how populist plutocracy can be studied, that is, of which components can be identified for properly analysing it from a methodological point of view. Subsequently, we will try to apply such insights to the study of many populist plutocratic cabinets, distinguishing them into two classes: the populist plutocrat-led cabinets and the fully plutocratic populist cabinets. Finally, we will try to show how populist plutocracy actually represents a degenerative form of democracy.