A historiography of populism and neopopulism in Latin America

Abstract

For over a half-century, Latin American and other scholars have written reams and held innumerable conferences about the populist style of politics in the region. Historians quickly joined in with their theories, methods, and perspectives. Most literature focused on the classic period from the 1930s to 1970s, when populism dominated many nations' governments. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the region rebounded from military dictatorship, new leaders using populist methods won office and instituted economic policies in line with neoliberalism. This reappearance, called neopopulism, sparked new interest in the subject. Finally, after 2000, numerous left-leaning politicians gave rise to a radical phase of neopopulism that lasted over a decade. This essay follows historians' and social scientists' work documenting and analyzing these phenomena. 1 | INTRODUCTION The term populism first arose with reference to Latin America in the 1940s and soon became broadly applied to many leaders, parties, movements, policies, and episodes, before and after. The phenomenon seemed to disappear during the military regimes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, only to reappear in the 1990s in the guise of neopopulism. Over the decades the concept found frequent usage in Brazil,