Venezuela's Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective Kirk A. Hawkins Populism is best understood as a Manichaean world view linked to a characteristic language or discourse. Chavismo, the movement that sustains Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, is a paradigmatic instance of populism. Using a novel, crosscountry dataset on populist discourse, combined with extensive data from within Venezuela and across other countries, this book demonstrates that populist movements can be understood as responses to widespread corruption and economic crisis. The book analyzes the Bolivarian Circles and government missions in Venezuela, revealing how populist ideas influence political organization and policy. The analysis provides important insight into the nature of populism, including its causes and consequences, and addresses broader questions about the role of ideas in politics.

Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America.

This article pushes forward our understanding of populism by developing one of the more underappreciated definitions of populism, populism as discourse. It does so by creating a quantitative measure of populist discourse suitable for cross-country and historical analysis. The article starts by laying out the discursive definition of populism in the context of existing definitions. It then operationalizes this definition through a holistic grading of speeches by current chief executives and a few historical figures. The result is a data set of elite-level populist discourse in more than 40 current and past governments from a variety of countries across the world, with special focus on Latin America. This measurement has high reliability comparable to standard human-coded content analysis, compares well to common understandings of actual cases of populism, and is a reasonably efficient technique even in small samples.

Although the study of populism has traditionally been the domain of Latin Americanists, research here has become increasingly comparative. One of the most important payoffs of this comparative work is conceptual. Rather than defining populism in structuralist, economic, or political-strategic terms, a growing number of scholars around the world are using an ideational conceptualization that draws heavily from earlier discursive theories. By employing the ideational approach, scholars have been able to provide empirical measures of populist discourse. In this article we explain and show the advantages of this ideational approach to a Latin American audience by presenting a new historical dataset measuring the discourse of Argentine, Chilean, and Peruvian presidents across the twentieth century. Our main intent is to clarify the ideational approach as well as to enliven the conceptual debate. While we are critical of alternative definitions, we acknowledge and reassess their theoretical insights.Aun cuando el estudio del populismo ha sido tradicionalmente un campo de los latinoamericanistas, la investigación al respecto se ha vuelto cada vez más comparativa. Uno de los beneficios más importantes de los trabajos comparados es conceptual. En vez de definir al populismo en términos estructurales, económicos o político-estratégicos, un creciente número de académicos alrededor del mundo utilizan una conceptualización ideacional vinculada con previas teorías discursivas. Mediante el uso del enfoque ideacional académicos han sido capaces de proveer mediciones empíricas de discurso populista. En este artículo explicamos y mostramos las ventajas del enfoque ideacional mediante la discusión de una nueva base de datos que mide el discurso de los presidentes de Argentina, Chile y Perú durante el siglo veinte. Nuestra principal intensión es clarificar el enfoque ideacional y a su vez avivar el debate conceptual. Si bien es cierto que somos críticos de definiciones alternativas, reconocemos y reconsideramos sus aportes teóricos.

Most studies see demand for populist forces driven by broad sociological factors that make certain issues salient among specific constituencies. However, this argument is not normally tested at the individual level. We propose a theory of populist voting which argues that populist attitudes are themselves important predictors of voting, interacting with ideological positions. We test this theory through a comparison of recent voting in Chile and Greece, two countries where the contexts for activating populist attitudes are very different. We find that despite similar levels of populist attitudes across both countries, these attitudes explain much more of the vote in Greece than they do in Chile, and that in both countries they interact with ideological positions in predictable ways.