Search

The U.S. Federal Constitution was built to be a machine for displacing conflict. Madison and the other Framers erected a Federal Republic organized to control populist movements and preserve the interests of the greatest stakeholders, while offering the 'most liberty imaginable' in 1788. In 2016, a populist movement ascended to the commanding heights of power. How did it happen and what are the consequences when a faction comes to power? Is it a defect of the modern structure of American government? Has the U.S. Constitution reached a place where it is no longer functional? Or can Madison's Republic continue to work against popular factions rising in a common passion fired by fear and hatred? In tackling these questions, this article suggests that the U.S. Constitutional Framers did not know in 1788 what exiting the aristocratic and feudal world would mean and what kind of state and society the Republic would become. I argue Madison's contributions to The Federalist are exemplars of the engineer showing how each part of the machine fits together to achieve a comprehensive and effective whole. The national populism of the kind circulating around the Western world in 2016 has posed real challenges to that machinery. Keywords: Populism, Political Theory, U.S. Constitution, Liberalism, Liberty, Constitutional Ideals, Democracy, United States, Madison, Founding Fathers, Framers, Federal Republic. Los creadores de la Constitucion de los EE. UU. no sabian en 1788 ni lo que significaria el fin del mundo aristocratico y feudal, ni en que tipo de sociedad y estado se convertiría la República. Había en este acto de creación una oferta milagrosa de los fundamentos de un ideal democrático y constitucional que fluye con los valores del liberalismo, el pluralismo, la libertad y la igualdad, igualmente fundamentados en la misma Ilustración. La constitución federal fue creada para ser una máquina que descarta el conflicto. Madison y los otros creadores fundaron una república federal para controlar los movimientos populistas y preservar los intereses de los afectados más importantes, y al mismo tiempo ofrecer 'la mayor libertad imaginable' en 1788. Palabras clave: populismo, teoría política, Constitución de EE. UU., nacionalismo, populismo, liberalismo, libertad, ideales constitucionales, democracia, Madison, padres fundadores, diseñadores, república federal. [phrase omitted] [phrase omitted], James Madison was no populist. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution had limited definitions for citizens, and the very word democracy held negative connotations until the nineteenth century. Near the [...]

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. Keywords: populism; discourse; textual analysis; holistic grading; measurement

This article uses a two-level framework to explain variation in Latin American populist parties' responses to the neoliberal challenge of the 1980s and 1990s. First, it examines the incentives for adaptation, focusing on the electoral and economic environments in which parties operated. Second, it examines parties' organizational capacity to adapt, focusing on leadership renovation and the accountability of office-holding leaders to unions and party authorities. This framework is applied to four cases: the Argentine Justicialista Party (PJ), the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Peruvian APRA party, and Venezuelan Democratic Action (AD). In Argentina, the combination of strong incentives and substantial adaptive capacity resulted in radical programmatic change and electoral success. In Mexico, where the PRI had high adaptive capacity but faced somewhat weaker external incentives, programmatic change was slower but nevertheless substantial, and the party survived as a major political force. In Peru, where APRA had some capacity but little incentive to adapt, and in Venezuela, where AD had neither a strong incentive nor the capacity to adapt, populist parties achieved little programmatic change and suffered steep electoral decline. Keywords: Argentina; Mexico; Peru; Venezuela; populist parties; party change

This article examines the impact of Venezuelans' economic assessments on the election of a radical reformer, President Hugo Chavez. Multinomial logit analysis of pre-electoral survey data shows that sociotropic perceptions of recent losses and high hopes for future improvements significantly boosted support for Chavez. When political judgments and issue positions are considered, people's prospective assessments retain their significant effect, whereas negative retrospective evaluations indirectly affect vote intentions for Chavez, namely, via rejection of the established political elite. These findings seem to corroborate claims of economic voting literature but cannot be interpreted in narrowly materialistic terms. Instead, the striking gulf between despair about the past and exalted hopes for the future shows the impact of Chavez's charisma. Rather than reflecting a dispassionate assessment of likely developments, people's expectations of a dramatic turnaround seem driven by the psychological need to believe that current problems must find a solution, which 'Americanist' literature has documented. Keywords: elections; public opinion; populism; charisma; cognitive psychology

Support for reform candidates followed three distinct patterns, identified as traditional reform, municipal populist, and progressive. Whether traditional-reform and municipal-populist voters could be brought together to form a progressive coalition depended on the way experts were incorporated into city politics. The coalition that elected John Purroy Mitchel mayor of New York in 1913 combined traditional-reform voters who had previously supported Seth Low with municipal-populist voters who had previously supported William Randolph Hearst, but tensions between business interests and the experts who helped to construct Mitchel's coalition contributed to the fragmentation of the progressive coalition in the election of 1917.