How and Where Does Populism Thrive?

Abstract

Chapter 4 answers the question: How, and where, does populism rise to power? through an empirical examination of the concepts and theories established in earlier chapters It begins with an elaborate analysis of the most important cases of populist emergence in postwar Europe and Latin America (including, in order of historical appearance, Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Hungary) and continues, in counterfactual fashion, with two nation cases, Brazil and Spain, in which populism could have grown strong, but did not. This is followed by an analysis of modern U.S. populism in a comparative perspective. American populism, in particular, offers several insights, especially into the role of extraordinary radical leadership and the complexities of dealing with the “people” as an ostensibly homogeneous social unit in an otherwise heterogeneous society.