Populist Leadership, Opportunistic Decision-Making, and Poliheuristic Theory: Cristina Kirchner's Decision to Defy “The Vultures”

Abstract

This study asks how two typically observed empirical manifestations across cases of international populist agency—issue-specific mass mobilization and personalistic decision-making—operate within politicized decision contexts to produce foreign policy outputs. Integrating a political-strategic conceptualization of populism with poliheuristic theory (PH), it is argued that the definitional components of populist leadership imply a particular inclination toward opportunistic decision-making. While PH suggests that most chief executives rely on heuristic option rejection but finally switch to more analytic option selection, the logic of political-strategic populism could enable and compel leaders to make entirely heuristic choices with a non-compensatory focus on domestic political constraints and opportunities. The plausibility of this proposition is probed with a theory-testing process-tracing of the Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's decision to defy holdout creditors in a polarizing sovereign debt litigation. The results indicate more potential to analyze within-case mechanisms through which populism influences decision-making processes and outcomes.