Latin America
Author(s)
Padoan, Enrico
Date Issued
2024
Type
bookPart
Start Page
398
End Page
409
Abstract
Sometimes, one has the impression that, in Europe and increasingly in the United States,
‘populism’ is mostly used as a derogatory concept to identify either the contemporary radical
right or, casting a wider net, plain demagoguery: a concept popularized mainly during the last
20 years. In Latin America, populism as an explanatory concept, while still contested, has
nearly a century-old history, which is distinct. This chapter, while not having the ambition of
detailing a proper history of the usage of the concept in Latin America, focuses on its main
evolution for defining and being applied to the main Latin American ‘populist waves’ as
identified by the literature.
This exercise aims at highlighting the extent to which the old critiques of Eurocentrism
advanced towards the early adoption of the concept of populism to analyse specific Latin
American phenomena, while well-founded, pale in comparison to the current state of the
debate in populism studies, which tend to adopt a restrictive – and, in the end, analytically
problematic – conceptualization. A rigorous criticism of the current state of the art offers the
possibility of rediscovering and debating anew the early structuralist-functionalist understanding
of populist phenomena to analyse the latter in Latin America, and beyond.