Rethinking Populist Discourse From Latin America: Algorithmic Activism and the Constitution of a People in Chile

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore some of the ideological and empirical limits of studies on populism from a perspective based on Latin American history and theories, on one hand, and current ideas about digitalization and political discourse, on the other. I will first argue that studies on populism have a monolingual bias that conceals an ethnocentric view on academic research. As a consequence, when the term “populism” is applied to Latin American political discourse and history, it implies a pejorative view on democracies other than liberal European. Leaving aside this perspective, I will then present a different view of Latin American populisms, which allows for a richer, more complex perspective, including the key role of “the people” as a discursive actor that can even dispense with a populist leader, especially in the case of mediatized democracies. As a case study, I will analyze activism in Chile by observing Twitter’s Trending Topics (TT) during the first week of the mass protests in October 2019. The analysis of TT hashtags helped us to better desccribe this process as one of handcrafted algorithmic activism which developed at least four tactics: the formulation of explicit demands, off-hours tweetstorms, syntagmatic variation, and HT confrontation and appropriation.

Social Identity, Perceived Emotional Synchrony, Creativity, Social Representations, and Participation in Social Movements: The Case of the 2019 Chilean Populist Protests

“…Spontaneous “anti-austerity protests” in Latin America, such as the ones in Chile during 2019–2020, are “social movements in opposition to what is perceived as the illegitimate dismantling of a historically negotiated contract between state and people; such movements are, however, political in a broader sense—with their central concern for social justice and the moral economy, they constitute a distinctive form of populist movement” ( Walton and Seddon, 1994 ; see Aslanidis, 2017 for a broader discussion). It is important to highlight the conditions that describe the Chilean social outbreak and correspond to the attributes seen in different experiences of populism in Latin America ( Bonnin, 2020 ). First, the movement arose from a situation of crisis or change as described before.…”

“…On the other hand, the rapid evolution of the social movement managed to agglutinate a large number of demands, groups, and social collectives, seeking to represent the “people,” understood as a collective entity that transcends individuals and draws on anti-liberal political traditions. Although populism is used as a pejorative term ( Rovira et al, 2017 ), populist movements in Latin America are related to contradictory processes; notoriously, the process of domination, but also of liberation and agency, due to the conception of “the people” as a complex social identity rather than a pre-existent demographic entity ( Bonnin, 2020 ). In this regard, populist movements such as the Chilean one differ from other populist political and social movements in four aspects: (a) Their quest is to represent a total collectivity as opposed to a particular social group; (b) Their objective is to make major structural and political changes that address the issues causing the crisis ( Aslanidis, 2017 ); (c) They lack the need for a populist leader due to the weight given to “the people” as a social identity ( Bonnin, 2020 ); (d) They aim to expand democracy ( Mansbridge and Macedo, 2019 ) and do not associate themselves with authoritarian restrictions of democracy or support for strong “Bonapartist” government leadership (e.g., the governments of Peron, Vargas, or Ibañez in Argentina, Brazil, or Chile).…”