The Will of the People: Populism and Citizen Participation in Latin America

The Will of the People: Populism and Citizen Participation in Latin America argues that while populist leaders typically claim to speak ’in the name of the people’, they rarely allow the people to express their opinion independently through institutions of citizen participation. The argument is rooted in theoretical discussions and empirical analyses of trends and specific cases.

The volume deals with the following questions: Why is populism so prolific in the Latin American region? How and where do populist leaders arrive to power? Is there a connection between populism and fascism as claimed by negative views of Argentinian Peronism? Are populist leaders more keen on introducing mechanisms of direct citizen participation? Are the erosions of the political party system an explanation of the emergence of populism, as seems to be the case with Fujimorism in Peru? To what extent have the governments of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa given voice to the people through the so-called participatory democracy?

Yanina Welp is a research fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute (Switzerland), editorial coordinator at Agenda Pública (Spain) and co-founder of the Red de Politologas. She finished her Habilitation (highest degree in the Swiss German academic system) in 2015 at the University of St.Gallen, with the venia legendi in Latin American Studies and she holds two Bachelor degrees in Social Communication and Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). Her main areas of study are democracy and democratization, political representation, the introduction and practices of mechanisms of direct and participatory democracy, and digital media and politics, i.e. ’democratic innovations’. She has published extensively on these topics in academic journals and books.