Understanding Contemporary Populism Through the Latin American Experience

Abstract

This paper discusses how the Latin American experience can help us understand contemporary populism and its management. This topic starts from the assumption that structural change and social contexts help us explain the evolution of populism in the same way they helped explain the evolution of violence and management. To do so, we look at the state of the literature on populism, its relation to the Latin American experience, the evolution of the approach to populism, and the conclusions we can draw from these different perspectives. We conclude that contemporary populism is also limited in the same way the contextual approach to Latin American populism was limited. This also helps us understand why we still do not have a shared definition of populism. Overall, we lack the balance between generalisable and local definitions to help leaders manage the contemporary violence of populism.