Journal of Democracy

Threats and Their Limits

In seeking to provide a fuller and better-balanced assessment of the threat that populism poses to democracy, I recognize that populism, if left unchecked, will distort, abridge, and eventually destroy democracy.⁶ These pernicious impulses arise from the very nature of populism, which in my definition revolves around personalistic, plebiscitarian leadership.⁷ Accordingly, populist leaders revel in self-importance, impetuousness, and charisma. They act with supreme self-confidence in pursuing their goals. Moreover, they base an eager quest for unconstrained power on direct, plebiscitarian support from a heterogeneous, amorphous, and largely unorganized mass of followers.

In other words, dominant "big men" govern as they see fit. As a justification, they invoke their electoral victories and their popularity ratings. In most cases, they do not bother with trying to build firm, well-institutionalized parties. Instead, when faced with opposition, their first impulse will be to mobilize their plebiscitarian mass support to push aside obstacles to their hegemonic ambitions.

In order to sustain and augment their predominance, personalistic leaders ceaselessly try to increase their autonomy and concentrate power. They constantly try to bend and undermine institutional constraints, including the checks and balances of liberal democracy. [End Page 44]

Without disciplined, reliable backing, populists seek to keep their mass followings agitated by goading foes and picking political fights. Claiming to be the only thing standing between "the people" and its dangerous enemies, populists want and need to mobilize widespread fervent support. Yet by turning politics into war, they shred political tolerance and civility. Rather than accepting free and fair competition, they harass the opposition and try by all means to prevent their adversaries from ever winning office again. For all these reasons, the danger of an authoritarian involution looms. Populism by its nature is a threat to liberal pluralism.

Fortunately, however, the threat has limits. Personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders come nowhere near always achieving their nefarious goals. In many instances, democracy has survived populist governments; and even when it did suffer temporary damage, it often recovered quickly. Thus, populist chief executives cannot suffocate liberal pluralism at will. Instead, they succeed with their innate efforts at power concentration only under narrow conditions. There have to be special openings for their autocratic impulses.

These openings are of two kinds, each of which is related to the very nature of populism: institutional weaknesses that give overbearing leaders extra room for maneuver, and unusual circumstances that enable them to win overwhelming mass support. The weaker institutions are, the more latitude personalistic leaders will have for achieving undemocratic hegemony. In other words, institutional weakness increases the chances for populist strength.

Second, populist leaders can boost their plebiscitarian clout if they encounter and seize opportunities to supercharge their support. This, in turn, can be brought about in two ways: by handing out massive socioeconomic benefits in politically targeted ways, or by solving major crises. Either can allow the populist-in-chief to posture as the "savior of the people" and appear even more charismatic. Thus, the astute distribution of large gains or clear success in averting and reversing large losses enable populist chief executives to win overwhelming mass backing.

The thing to note is that chances for populist success are shaped by objective, preexisting conditions. A leader, no matter how ambitious, cannot simply engineer these conditions and guarantee gains in power concentration. Populist chief executives will test the checks and balances that constrain them, but the strength that these constraints possess before the populist's victory at the polls will determine whether the liberal framework withstands the challenge. A populist who takes the helm in a time of weak institutions is more worrisome than one who comes into office facing a robust and consolidated framework of institutional boundaries.

Similarly, populists cannot conjure conjunctural opportunities out of nothing. Even the wiliest of leaders will have only limited room to dramatize [End Page 45] and exaggerate problems while blaming them on predecessors and adversaries. The rhetoric of crisis must be rooted in facts; only in that case will a populist find that it has widespread resonance and yields substantial political benefits. Contrary to recent claims, absent serious problems that threaten large segments of the citizenry with huge losses, populist leaders cannot just "perform" crisis.⁸

Objective conditions, therefore, will shape the ability of populist chief executives to grab power, undermine opposition forces, and suppress liberal pluralism. Democracy's record tells us that it does not die easily. Instead, it often shows considerable resilience that personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders can overcome only under special circumstances. What exactly are the problematic conditions that exacerbate the danger posed by populism?

Institutional Weakness and Plebiscitarian Opportunity

My research identifies three types of institutional weakness. Which kind prevails where depends on the system of government that a country has as well as the solidity of its institutional framework. Parliamentary systems base executive power in the legislature and thus have an inherently attenuated separation of powers that can give populist machinations an institutional opening. The prime minister is both the chief executive and the direct leader of the party or coalition that runs parliament. This closeness between legislative and executive power allows parliamentary governments to push through big changes with relative ease. The lack of a clear distinction between the executive and the legislature creates an opening that a populist leader can exploit by expanding the powers of the premiership, capturing resources, or passing measures (such as gerrymandered districts) designed to make the electoral system favor the ruling party.

Presidential systems, by contrast, enshrine a clearer separation of powers. In principle, their multiplicity of institutional veto players creates strict checks and balances. But across much of Latin America, institutional compliance is spotty. Therefore, powerful presidents can override or bend these constraints in quasi-legal ways: Such chief executives arrogate powers that they do not formally have and, in effect, dare anyone or any institution to stop them. Many of these countries are thus exposed to the risk of having populist leaders push through quasi-legal changes that are usually meant to make such leaders even more powerful.

Because this type of change is transgressive and not fully legal, however, it often creates friction and contestation. Opposition forces may not manage to reverse every arrogation of power, but their determined resistance can make the path to political hegemony steeper by making it harder for a president to impose one quasi-legal change after another. Thus, pushy populists may be able to extend their power here and there, [End Page 46] but overturning the whole constitutional framework and establishing their own unchallengeable predominance usually proves beyond their reach.

There is a third type of institutional weakness, however, which is particularly severe. Presidential systems can suffer from destabilizing conflicts that bring threats of coups and see incumbents driven from office by dubious means that undermine legitimate governance. In Ecuador from 1997 to 2005, for instance, three presidents (Abdalá Bucaram, Jamil Mahuad, and Lucio Gutiérrez) were ousted through protests in the streets or civil-military coups in the halls of power, with the first and the third toppled executives being held by Congress to have been, respectively, mentally incompetent (a finding not supported by medical evidence) or in a state of "abandonment of office."⁹ Venezuela during the 1990s, Bolivia in the early 2000s, and Peru after 2016 experienced similar descents into turmoil and instability.

This high instability constitutes the gravest type of institutional weakness, imposing few constraints on populist leaders: The whole system is quaking, and checks and balances have turned brittle. Democracy could crumble. By contrast, quasi-legal changes give populist presidents much less latitude for their illiberal machinations. After all, institutional obstacles to presidential power hunger are still present; congress and the courts can also serve as bastions for pushback by opposition forces. Parliamentary systems are middling in institutional solidity, because under certain conditions a populist premier can do with perfect legality what a populist president can only do by means that are (at best) only quasi-legal.

Institutional weakness and even high instability, however, are by themselves not sufficient for the populist destruction of democracy. Consider recent evidence from Peru. There, Pedro Castillo won the 2021 presidential election as a left-wing populist. The country was suffering from high instability, but Castillo had no conjunctural opportunities to push populist power claims. Instead, opposition forces contested many of his decisions. His attempt to close Congress in response was anything but a winning move. His attempted autogolpe (self-coup) led Congress to swiftly oust him, and he now languishes in prison.

As this case suggests, even weak institutions can still constrain personalistic, plebiscitarian chief executives. To achieve hegemony, such a politician needs a break—some happening or situation that opens the way to overwhelming mass support. Only then, backed by legions of fervid followers, can the power-hungry official burst the bonds of fettering rules and institutions. Castillo never received such an opening, and was in a weak position to begin with since he had won the election narrowly (over a rival populist to his right) and his party lacked a legislative majority.

As noted above, these conjunctural opportunities come in two strikingly [End Page 47] distinct forms. First, massive windfall rents arising from high world prices for oil or gas exports can allow populist governments to boost their support by astutely distributing benefits. Second, crises that are acute and severe yet resolvable give a bold personalistic leader the chance to win popular gratitude by fixing an urgent problem. As the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky noted, people tend to be "loss averse" (losses loom larger in their minds than gains), so a leader who can claim to have averted national collapse can come to appear as a "savior," with a correspondingly devoted following.¹⁰ Such a leader's next step may be to depict the imposition of authoritarianism as needed for "returning to normal."

Crisis is a notoriously slippery concept, often used vaguely to mean any problem that a country may face. To be analytically useful, there need to be clear criteria. My theory therefore confines this notion to truly urgent, huge problems—namely, hyperinflation (price increases above 50 percent a month), a major economic recession (contraction exceeding 5 percent per annum), a guerrilla war (more than five-thousand armed militants fighting the government), and oppressive crime (an annual homicide rate topping 35 per 100,000 inhabitants). These figures for establishing what is a crisis in my strict sense point to the dire conditions under which populist chief executives can position themselves to strangle democracy.

Big crises are objective and exogenous "givens" that act as acid tests of political agency and leadership. It takes considerable skill to design a plan to rescue a country from an acute and severe crisis, and considerable courage and determination to carry it through to a successful conclusion. Domineering populists, given as they are to boldness, may seem well suited to combat crises. Yet not all such leaders will possess the requisite talent—including the ability to recruit, hire, and manage competent aides—or the skill at marshaling political support that major-crisis resolution requires.

A populist chief executive who fails to resolve a pressing crisis stands to lose political standing and suffer opposition counterattacks. A leader who is handed the opportunity to solve a crisis but fails may well end up falling from power. Fortunately, where populism "dies" in this way, democracy mostly survives.

Three Narrow Paths to Destruction

While both institutional weakness and conjunctural opportunities are decisive for facilitating populists' suffocation of liberal pluralism, neither of these factors alone determines this outcome; instead, they have to coincide and interact. In other words, these factors constitute necessary conditions, but only their combination can create sufficient conditions.

Interestingly, my analysis of forty cases of populist government in Latin [End Page 48] America and Europe over the last four decades shows that there are three distinctive combinations, which correspond to three well-known types of populism. Two are from Latin America, while the third is European.¹¹

First, where grave institutional weakness and high instability prevail, a huge revenue windfall is a supreme gift to a populist chief executive. Political hegemony becomes reachable, the opposition can be sidelined, and democracy can be smothered. This was the path taken by Venezuela's Chávez, then followed by his "Bolivarian" disciples Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and considered or attempted by some later converts to left-wing populism such as President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras (2006–2009). Focusing as it does on vows to enhance popular well-being, lift poverty, and alleviate social inequality, left-wing populism requires an abundance of resources. The global commodities boom that marked the first decade and a half of this century was a bonanza for populists of the left, and nowhere more than in Latin America, a region whose political and economic history has long been closely bound up with commodities prices.

Second, because rightists often focus on safeguarding order and stability, conservative populists can benefit mightily from resolving major economic or security crises. Populists of the right can achieve this feat by overcoming hyperinflation or a deep recession or by suppressing a guerrilla insurgency or crime surge, as outlined above.

In Europe's parliamentary systems, with their potential for enacting major change with relative ease, a single crisis (a severe recession) gave two populists a stepping stone to legislative dominance and power-concentrating institutional transformations. In Turkey and Hungary, respectively, Erdoğan and Orbán outmaneuvered and overpowered opposition to claim political hegemony. Other right-wing populists, by contrast, failed to encounter the political opportunity arising from an economic crisis. They therefore tried to concentrate power in legally problematic ways that brought backlash, as Poland has seen since 2015, for instance. The conflict hindered the push toward illiberalism and shielded democracy's core, enabling democratic opposition parties to defeat the populist government in the October 2023 election.

Where the institutional framework was moderately strong, by contrast, as in Latin America's presidential systems, a single crisis was not enough to enable the installation of competitive authoritarianism. Instead, only the truly exceptional coincidence of two conjunctural opportunities enabled a populist chief executive to achieve a decisive breakthrough, overpower the opposition, and establish an authoritarian regime. Neoliberal populist Fujimori in 1990s Peru traced this path because he both ended catastrophic hyperinflation and vanquished a large guerrilla insurgency. He translated this pair of crisis resolutions into mass support that enabled him to carry out a self-coup. [End Page 49]

In recent years, El Salvador's Bukele has achieved similarly striking successes by containing the covid pandemic with unusual effectiveness and cracking down on gang violence.¹² He has leveraged his popularity into an energetic assault on democracy, suspending rights and having the Legislative Assembly fire all five Constitutional Court judges plus the attorney-general in a bid to overturn a 2014 ruling that would have barred him from running for a second five-year term in February 2024. As of this writing in October 2023, he is the heavy favorite to win.

By contrast, neoliberal populists who have resolved only a single crisis have so far proven unable to break down institutional checks and balances and achieve hegemony. Even when reelected, they have continued to face opposition strong enough to deny their perpetuation in power. And failing to resolve a crisis—or adopting stringent, crisis-level measures that the public deems unjustified—remains a predictable recipe for populist failure.

In sum, would-be populist authoritarians need a rare mix of institutional weaknesses and extreme circumstances in order to sink democracy. Hungry for power though they might be, populist politicians cannot impose illiberal hegemony at will. They need feeble institutions plus either a resource bonanza to distribute or crisis resolutions for which they can claim credit. That is a tall order—much taller than many commentators seem to grasp. Democracy's staying power is consequently stronger than they realize as well. Populism endangers political liberalism, but attacks from within by elected chief executives can succeed only in special situations that cannot be engineered at will. Under many circumstances, democracy has managed to escape and resist the threats arising from the global wave of populism.

Rightist Populism in Latin America

How exactly have these dynamics played out in recent decades? Why has democracy sometimes crumbled under populist pressures, yet survived on many other occasions? Crisis is opportunity, as the experiences of Latin America's neoliberal populists since the 1980s show.

Most remarkably, Peru's Fujimori turned adversity into advantage. An agronomist with no political experience, he unexpectedly won the 1990 presidential election as Peru reeled from runaway inflation plus the brutal Maoist insurgency known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). He attacked both challenges, stabilizing the economy by early 1991 and devising a strategy to end the violence. His April 1992 autogolpe shuttered Congress and the courts, winning him popular approval that topped 80 percent.¹³ Strong U.S. pressure made Fujimori stop short of open dictatorship, but he installed competitive authoritarianism behind a façade of restored democracy. In September 1992, his intelligence agents captured Sendero's leadership. Currency stability [End Page 50] unleashed economic growth, and he won reelection with a 64 percent landslide in 1995. He engineered another reelection in 2000, but his personalistic rule soon collapsed amid a corruption scandal and he later went to prison for rights abuses. In sum, Peru's dual crisis paved the way for many years of populist authoritarianism.

Unlike Fujimori, Argentina's Carlos Menem (1989–99) and Colombia's Álvaro Uribe (2002–10) each faced just a single acute and severe crisis. Menem eventually tamed hyperinflation while Uribe made substantial headway against insurgencies, and each won reelection. But they did not win the overwhelming clout needed to dismantle democracy and impose authoritarianism. Whereas Fujimori was able to force constitutional changes via his self-coup, Menem had to negotiate with the opposition by making liberal concessions. And when Uribe tried to pass a regime-transforming institutional overhaul, he suffered defeat in a referendum. Neither Menem nor Uribe went beyond a second term, and full democratic competitiveness remained standing in Argentina and Colombia alike. In neither country did a single crisis open the door to competitive authoritarianism.

Neoliberal populists who failed to resolve a crisis, or who tried to "perform" one that did not exist, were even less successful. Brazil's President Fernando Collor de Mello (1990–92) faced hyperinflation, but failed to restore economic stability. Politically weakened, he was impeached and removed from office on corruption charges. Guatemala's Jorge Serrano (1991–93) and Ecuador's Bucaram a few years later acted as if they were facing serious crises. The former tried a version of Fujimori's autogolpe while the latter sought to imitate Menem's drastic stabilization plan. Hyperinflation and hyperviolent insurgencies were missing, however, and both presidents wound up being driven from office early.¹⁴

This record suggests that Latin America's neoliberal populists need two deep and simultaneous crises to suffocate democracy. A single crisis is not sufficient for imposing competitive authoritarianism, while failing to solve a crisis or taking drastic steps amid noncrisis conditions will end an ambitious politician's career before any major assault on democracy is possible.

Leftist Populism in Latin America

Latin America's anti-neoliberal populists of the early 2000s also managed to suppress democracy only under narrow conditions, namely, the coincidence of high instability and giant windfall rents. This combination enabled Venezuela's Chávez and his disciples Morales and Correa in Bolivia and Ecuador to impose authoritarian hegemony. By contrast, several other Bolivarian aspirants lacking these conditions failed.

Chávez won a decisive electoral victory in 1998 after Venezuela's [End Page 51] seemingly consolidated democracy had been battered by two coup attempts, the first one spearheaded by Lieutenant-Colonel Chávez himself in early 1992. As president, he immediately took advantage of the instability and intimidated the courts into letting him push through his constitutionally dubious plan to convene a constituent assembly. The new charter that resulted put an end to bicameralism and vested more powers in the presidency.¹⁵ Chávez dissolved Congress and then swept the July 2000 general election that he had called.

This power grab caused widespread concern, including among business and organized labor. Conflict escalated, and Chávez was subjected to a brief coup as well as a recall campaign. He was restored after the two-day April 2002 putsch thanks to the coupmakers' irresolution, but his career likely survived the August 2004 recall referendum only because world oil prices had begun shooting upward in 2003. As one of the world's leading exporters, Venezuela reaped a windfall that Chávez used to pay for a raft of new social programs. Buying support from the mass public as well as elites to whom he handed juicy contracts, the savvy populist sailed first through the recall with 59 percent and then through his 2006 reelection with 63 percent. He was free to set up the authoritarian regime that still rules Venezuela under his successor Nicolás Maduro, who became president when Chávez died of cancer in 2013. Instability had allowed the golpista colonel to begin his wrecking job on Venezuelan democracy, while the rising tide of oil rents had allowed him to carry it through to completion and stay in power.¹⁶

Inspired by Chávez's political success, Morales in gas-exporting Bolivia and Correa in oil-exporting Ecuador soon followed his democracy-strangling script. Both countries had suffered recent crises involving the presidency, creating in each high instability that aided the push for a rapid constitutional overhaul. The global commodities boom that had saved Chávez was going strong, underwriting economic growth and generous social programs. The resulting outpouring of support allowed each president to march his country into competitive authoritarianism, much as Chávez had marched his.

By contrast, without the coincidence of high instability and massive hydrocarbon windfalls, Bolivarian populists elsewhere could not strangle liberal pluralism. In Ecuador's fragile democracy, the military nationalist and coupmaker Gutiérrez was a would-be Chávez double, but faced grave fiscal constraints because his January 2003 inauguration [End Page 52] came before the commodities boom had fully taken off. Feeling that he had no choice but to opt for neoliberal stabilization measures, Gutiérrez ended up alienating his own populist base while failing to gain reliable new allies. As we have seen, mass protests forced him to quit office in 2005. Without a timely revenue bonanza, this left-wing populist thus could not impose his undemocratic predominance.

President Zelaya in Honduras, a new convert to left-wing populism, sought to emulate Chávez's undemocratic recipe under even less promising circumstances than had existed in Ecuador. Honduras was not unstable and had no windfall to hand out (its main exports are coffee and inexpensive clothing, not petrochemicals), but Zelaya sought a Bolivarian constituent assembly anyway. He was moving to concentrate power and seemingly looking to perpetuate himself in office. Opposition forces entrenched in firm democratic institutions such as Congress and the judiciary blocked him. When he kept pushing harder, his adversaries had the military unconstitutionally depose and deport him.¹⁷ Zelaya's incipient move toward populist authoritarianism had been stopped, but tragically, constitutional democracy had been disrupted in the process.

Peru's Castillo, a latecomer to Bolivarian populism, also failed with a blatant power grab. The country had seen presidential crises aplenty and thus high instability, but the commodities boom had long ended, and with diversified exports and a strong private sector, Peru has never gifted its government vast treasure. An inexperienced figure without the funds to win overwhelming support, Castillo faced constant opposition challenges. His bid to crush his adversaries with an autogolpe was a massive backfire that landed the would-be autocrat in the same jail as Fujimori and another disgraced ex-president.

In sum, like their neoliberal counterparts on the right, Latin America's anti-neoliberal populists of the left could get away with suppressing democracy only under rare conditions. They needed high instability plus big hydrocarbon rents at the same time. This combination allowed Chávez, Morales, and Correa to push their countries into competitive authoritarianism, whereas its absence created insurmountable roadblocks for other left-wing populist leaders with designs against democracy.

Rightist Populism in Europe

Unlike left-wing populists, right-wing populists do not seem to need vast extra funds to open the door to authoritarianism. Instead, they need a crisis. My use of the singular is deliberate: Unlike in Latin America, where neoliberal populists bound by presidentialism's checks and balances have needed a pair of crises to solve in order to dismantle democracy, populists of the right in Europe have the advantage of parliamentarism's openness to changes and so need only one crisis to allow the concentration of power. [End Page 53]

In Hungary, a sharp recession pulverized the credibility of the governing Socialists and allowed conservative populist Orbán to win a supermajority in parliamentary elections. That was in 2010. The new premier immediately used his lawmaking steamroller to concentrate power in formally legal ways. He overhauled the constitution, distorted the electoral system, took over the judiciary, and reined in civil society. Because this uneven playing field has allowed Orbán to renew his supermajority in election after election, he moved Hungary into competitive authoritarianism in gradual, almost imperceptible ways.¹⁸

In Turkey a few years prior, a severe economic downturn had enabled right-wing populist Erdoğan to dominate the legislature via the 2002 election. But he had to deal with a dangerous extraparliamentary veto player, the Kemalist military, so he had to take a longer and more sinuous route to illiberal hegemony. With the typical opportunism of personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders, he boldly triangulated the liberal-democratic requirements associated with EU accession against the overbearing generals. Once he had neutralized the military through politicized trials that broke their tutelary power, he began boosting his own clout, going from premier to president and then to de facto superpresident. A 2016 coup by midlevel officers allowed him to crack down hard, sealing Turkey's descent into authoritarian rule.¹⁹ There have been big popular protests and rounds of elections, but none has shaken his grip on power.

By contrast, the absence of economic crises limited the political clout of Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland. (He preferred to run the government as something of an éminence grise, hence the "deputy" in his title.) Lacking a parliamentary supermajority, Kaczyński could not follow Orbán and asphyxiate democracy in formally legal ways. Instead, the Polish populist resorted to openly illiberal pushing and shoving. But these manipulations and infractions provoked strenuous opposition and frequent protests that hindered power concentration. As democracy survived, the governing Polish populists lost their parliamentary majority in the October 2023 election—a result sharply different from Orbán's renewed victory in Hungary's April 2022 parliamentary balloting.

The absence of grave economic problems also limited the prospects of several other conservative populists in Eastern Europe such as Slovakia's Robert Fico, Romania's Traian Băsescu, Bulgaria's Boyko Borisov, Slovenia's Janez Janša, and the Czech Republic's Andrej Babiš. Though soiled by widespread patronage and corruption, democracy proved resilient in these countries.

The same argument applies to the most successful case of right-wing populism in Western Europe, namely, that of the late Silvio Berlusconi (1936–2023), who was prime minister of Italy on and off between 1994 and 2011. Without an economic crisis to undermine his partisan competitors, the domineering media tycoon never won a single-party majority [End Page 54] in Parliament. Forced to rely on troublesome allies, he could never establish unchallenged preeminence and distort the institutional framework, much less wreck liberal pluralism. Italy's courts were active and influential in containing Berlusconi's power hunger. Indeed, his typically populist transgressions and personal scandals provoked so much opposition mobilization that Italian democracy improved in vibrancy and quality during his reign.²⁰

As all these experiences show, right-wing populists in Europe also depended on an unusual conjunctural opportunity to win the overwhelming clout required for destroying democracy. Although parliamentary systems provide openings for power-concentrating change, the rarity of economic crises prevented many personalistic plebiscitarian leaders from exploiting this weakness. As a result, democracy often persisted.

The Global North

The recent outpouring of concern about threats to democracy has gone too far. The difficulties that populist chief executives face in trying to subvert democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe have encouraging implications for the advanced industrialized world. Whereas scholars had once uniformly assumed that democracy was unshakably consolidated across the Global North, the electoral advances of personalistic plebiscitarians such as Marine Le Pen in France and, for a while, Matteo Salvini in Italy suddenly seemed to pose a serious threat: Could advanced industrial countries also be vulnerable to the populist inside attack with which Fujimori, Chávez, Orbán, and Erdoğan had strangled liberal pluralism?

My findings rebut this alarmism. They suggest that democracy in the Global North commands enormous resilience. North America and Western Europe fulfill none of the necessary conditions for the populist destruction of democracy. As regards the institutional framework, despite some corrosion due to polarization, checks and balances have held firm. Even in parliamentary systems with their attenuated separation of powers and greater susceptibility to change, the judiciary imposes strict constraints on prime ministers and limits illiberal transgressions. Federalist systems have additional layers of protection: State and municipal governments strenuously defend their independence against populist power grabs. Finally, constitutions remain hard to change. Whereas personalistic plebiscitarian leaders of all stripes, including Fujimori, Chávez, and Orbán, launched their assaults on democracy by means of profound constitutional overhauls, personalistic plebiscitarian leaders in the Global North cannot take this route. Thus, these countries do not suffer from the institutional weaknesses that populists in Latin America and Eastern Europe have exploited.

While this institutional strength already safeguards democracy, countries [End Page 55] in the Global North are also very unlikely to face the second set of necessary conditions for populism's suffocation of liberal pluralism, namely, unusual conjunctural opportunities. Complex economies with many sectors are not likely to experience big resource windfalls. In a country with a diversified economy, charismatic leaders will not benefit from a revenue bonanza like the one the global commodities boom handed to Chávez in oil-dependent Venezuela, with such dire repercussions for democracy.

Advanced socioeconomic and political development also minimizes the risk of acute and severe crises. For instance, when inflation recently drew near 10 percent a year in the Global North—a significant problem but light-years short of catastrophic hyperinflation—central banks began raising interest rates to tame it. And when authorities deemed the needs of covid-19 response to require the closure of many places of employment, governments adopted such generous compensation payments that average incomes sometimes increased.²¹ Moreover, countries of the Global North have strong states that forestall security crises. There is nothing like Sendero Luminoso in any advanced industrial country.

For these reasons, populist leaders in the Global North are most unlikely to find the conjunctural opportunities they would need to achieve overwhelming mass support. Yet without the 70 to 90 percent approval that a Fujimori, a Chávez, or a Bukele achieved, one cannot dismantle the liberal checks and balances that are so firmly entrenched in advanced industrialized countries.

In sum, the longstanding democracies of North America and Western Europe enjoy strong immunity to populism's threat. And we may have seen an even more dramatic version of this story before: During the interwar years, countries that had advanced on a liberal-democratic trajectory, such as England, France, and the Scandinavian states, avoided regime breakdown despite an unprecedented, exceptional coincidence of crises and challenges; even the determined onslaught of communism and fascism could not fell these systems (France, Denmark, and Norway were eventually overrun by Nazi military invaders, but being conquered by foreigners is not the same as regime collapse from within).²² Therefore, it is even less likely that the lower threat arising from contemporary populism in less turbulent times will now suffocate democracies that have matured further and made additional gains in institutional strength.

How grave is the populist threat to democracy? Given the seemingly unstoppable wave of personalistic, plebiscitarian leadership that has swept even the United States, there is reason for concern: Populist politicians with their power hunger and their attacks on checks and balances inherently endanger democracy. The more popular support and clout they win, the greater is the risk of an authoritarian involution.

Yet democracy is far from defenseless. Given reasonably solid institutions and an absence of rare, populist-friendly conditions, liberal [End Page 56] pluralism is likely to survive. As my investigation of populist governments in Latin America and Europe shows, these conditions prevail in a clear majority of instances. Of forty cases, only seven saw democracy strangled.

Personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders do not easily succeed with their autocratic machinations. Rather than dominating events, they must rely on preexisting institutional weakness and special conjunctural opportunities to win extraordinary popular support. Those chances arise from either huge hydrocarbon windfalls or acute and severe crises that inflict massive losses on the population. Because such opportunities appear so rarely (and also because crises are difficult to resolve), the paths to populist authoritarianism are narrow and steep. Many ambitious leaders get worn down along the way and end up hitting insurmountable roadblocks, while others fall victim to their own appetite for conflict and see their careers destroyed by it.

Personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders may force themselves inside the fortress of democracy, but seldom can they disarm its garrison or conquer it. Liberal pluralism has much greater resilience than observers have recognized, especially where it is as firmly entrenched and institutionally secured as in the Global North. While the threat of populism requires constant attention and energetic countermeasures, there is no need for global alarmism. [End Page 57]