Populism from a Latin American Perspective

Abstract

Discourses on contemporary populism owe much to the populism of the mid-20th century’s Latin America. From a Latin American perspective, the current paper critically reviews Dunn’s and Han’s papers on populism. These two papers are not quite directly comparable in their arguments because their analyses have discrete focuses and levels. Still, Dunn’s argument reasonably reflects the cases of the West whereas Han’s explains the Korean case quite effectively. One question that emerges from their discussion on populism is how generalizable their arguments are beyond the specific cases. From the perspective of Latin America, Dunn’s and Han’s arguments seem to have limited implications for understanding classical populism and contemporary neopopulism in Latin America though they provide insightful thoughts to rethink the political economy of the region with.