K Weyland
Biographic Data
| ID | 3323 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Weyland |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Weyland |
| SIGNATURE | WEYLAND K |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6106-8661 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 89 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2300 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 89 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 22 |
Opposition to populist backsliding
Why Populist Authoritarians Rarely Turn into Repressive Dictators
Why do most authoritarian regimes installed by populist chief executives not become full-scale, repressive dictatorships? As explanation, scholars argue that populist leaders base their rule on charismatic appeal and voluntary mass support; therefore, they do not need harsh coercion, which would undermine their popular legitimacy. While corroborating this argument, I highlight a crucial complementary factor: populist chief executives find it diff…
Charivari 2.0
In recent years, an old contentious tactic in which protesters besiege and harass public officials in their private homes has resurged. Discontented sectors of all stripes have employed what is most commonly called charivari or “rough music.” To elucidate this surprising reappearance, this reflection highlights the rise of conflict over cultural and moral values, affective polarization, and the personalization of politics. Moreover, the prolifera…
Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat
The recent global wave of populist governments, which culminated in Donald Trump's victory in 2016, has convinced many observers that populism is a grave threat to democracy. In his new book, Kurt Weyland critiques recent scholarship for focusing too closely on cases where populist leaders have crushed democracy, and instead turns to the many cases where would populist-authoritarians have failed to overthrow democracy. Through a systematic compar…
Concept Misformation in the Age of Democratic Anxiety
Despite Giovanni Sartori’s famous warning, contemporary academia has seen a new bout of conceptual stretching, as evident in the loose, expansive usage of terms such as coup and fascism . This concept creep reflects the normative progress of recent decades, which has ruled out true fascism and deterred full-scale coups. Because these normative advances have induced remaining nefarious actors to pursue their undemocratic goals through formally dem…
Why Democracy Survives Populism
This essay suggests that while populism certainly can be a mortal threat to democracy, the worst outcome is less common than observers have feared. The author's research shows that among forty populist governments in Latin America and Europe from 1985 to 2020, only seven led to authoritarian rule. It concludes that democracy often shows considerable resilience, with most populist leaders failing to suffocate liberal pluralism due to institutional…
The Populist Challenge to U.S. Democracy
Regarding the implications of the political developments of the last five years for the study of American political development (APD), this article argues that the unprecedented Trump phenomenon and its problematic repercussions for U.S. democracy have greatly enhanced the value of a comparative perspective, which can draw instructive lessons from the fate of attacks on liberal democracy by populist leaders in other countries. Comparativists exam…
Why US Democracy Trumps Populism
Matias López and Juan Luna (2021) challenged my comparative analysis of populism’s threat to democracy, its reliance on institutional factors (coupled with conjunctural opportunities), and especially the inference about US democracy’s immunity to populist suffocation. However, their emphasis on structuralist and culturalist factors, which would suggest the vulnerability of the United States, is strikingly selective, theoretically unconvincing, an…
How Populism Dies
Assault on Democracy
The interwar years saw the greatest reversal of political liberalization and democratization in modern history. Why and how did dictatorship proliferate throughout Europe and Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s? Blending perspectives from history, comparative politics, and cognitive psychology, Kurt Weyland argues that the Russian Revolution sparked powerful elite groupings that, fearing communism, aimed to suppress imitation attempts inspired b…
Constraining Dictatorship
Populism as a Political Strategy
Responding to Rueda’s questions, this essay explains the political-strategic approach (PSA) to populism and highlights its analytical strengths, which have become even more important with the emergence of populist governments across the world. PSA identifies populism’s core by emphasizing the central role of personalistic leaders who tend to operate in opportunistic ways, rather than consistently pursuing programmatic or ideological orientations.…
Firmer Roots of Ethnicity and Nationalism? New Historical Research and Its Implications for Political Science
Among social scientists, constructivism has long reigned supreme in the study of ethnicity, nationality, and nationalism. Accordingly, scholars have highlighted the role of cultural framing and political choice in the definition of ethnic categories, their fluidity, and their flexible boundaries. Conversely, they have deemphasized the historical roots of ethnicity and depicted nations as the contested products of nationalist movements and politic…
How Populism Corrodes Latin American Parties
One of the main ways in which populism damages democracy is through the corrosion of political-party systems, a phenomenon that has been especially pronounced in contemporary Latin America. Populism’s core, namely charismatic leadership, is to blame: Overbearing personalistic leaders avoid hemming in their own autonomy and predominance by keeping their electoral movements organizationally fluid and weak. And because opposing populism entails conf…
Populism’s Threat to Democracy
How grave is the threat that populist leaders pose to democracy? To elucidate the prospects of the United States under president Donald Trump, I conduct a wide-ranging comparative analysis of populism’s regime impact in Europe and Latin America. The investigation finds that the risks have been overestimated. Populist leaders manage to suffocate democracy only when two crucial conditions coincide. First, institutional weakness, which comes in vari…
Revolution and Reaction
Why did so many Latin American leftists believe they could replicate the Cuban Revolution in their own countries, and why did so many rightists fear the spread of Communism? Cognitive-psychological insights about people's distorted inferences and skewed interest calculations explain why the left held exaggerated hopes and why the right experienced excessive dread. The resulting polarization provoked a powerful backlash in which the right uniforml…
Too Many Cooks May Spoil the First Book—and Jeopardize the Author’s Career
Book workshops are widely regarded as yielding important benefits for junior scholars; therefore, these intensive feedback sessions have proliferated in recent years. However, closer consideration suggests some important notes of caution. A wealth of additional suggestions does not necessarily improve a post-dissertation manuscript; instead, comments and criticisms advanced by senior experts may induce young authors to back away from or tone down…
Promotion Letters
External referee letters can, in principle, provide essential inputs for tenure and promotion decisions. But scholars’ reluctance to prepare critical, not to speak of “negative” assessments has led to a skewed self-selection: Potential referees tend to accept the task only if they see a tenure or promotion case as worthy of support. The resulting overabundance of praise has devalued the content of referee reports; they are difficult to interpret …
Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy
Most observers believe that democracy brings important socioeconomic and political improvements for the broader citizenry. Empirical evidence, however, has been surprisingly mixed. Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo offer a provocative explanation. They claim that many democracies are thoroughly “elite biased” from the outset, hemmed in by constitutions engineered by the political and economic elites of preceding authoritarian regimes to safegua…
Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe
Naher Und Mittlerer Osten / Near and Middle East
Why Some Democracy Protests Do Diffuse
Cultural Backlash
Limits of US Influence
Scholars often assume that as a global superpower, the United States has had great influence and impact on political regime developments in the world. This article critically examines these claims, focusing on Latin America; by investigating the region most directly dominated by the US, it employs a most-likely-case design. The experiences of countries such as Brazil, Chile, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela show that US influence has been fairly l…
Populism
This article criticizes economic, discursive, and ideological definitions of populism and advocates and further develops a political-strategic conceptualization. The resulting definition emphasizes personalistic leadership that rests on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large masses of mostly unorganized followers. This definition captures the flexibility and opportunism of populism and accounts for the striking volatility of p…
Clarifying a Contested Concept
Social scientists commonly encounter concepts that are unclear and contested. Authors inspired by competing theories emphasize different attributes from a complex set of defining characteristics. These differences in intension produce differences in extension as scholars apply the same term to divergent sets of cases. Therefore, it is unclear how one author's findings apply to the cases delimited by another's different definition. Conceptual disa…
Theories of Policy Diffusion Lessons from Latin American Pension Reform
What accounts for the waves of policy diffusion that increasingly sweep across regions of the world? Why do many diverse countries adopt similar changes? Focusing on the spread of Chilean-style pension privatization in Latin America, this article assesses the relative merit of four theoretical explanations that scholars of diffusion have proposed. As the principal mechanism driving innovations' spread, these approaches emphasize external pressure…
Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America
Neoliberal Populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe
How do democracies enact drastic market reforms that impose considerable shortterm costs on large sectors of the population? What tactics do political leaders use to make such painful measures, which could trigger unrest and endanger democratic stability, politically viable? In addressing these important questions, some authors have resorted to the concept of populism. Roberts and Weyland have claimed an unexpected compatibility of populist polit…
Latin America’s Authoritarian Drift
Democracy has been on the defensive in contemporary Latin America; under the cover of progressive rhetoric, competitive authoritarianism has emerged. Leftist leaders like Hugo Chávez relied on populism to establish their political hegemony, erode institutional checks and balances, marginalize the opposition through discriminatory legalism, and severely skew political competition. Left-wing populism has done more damage to democracy than the right…
The Arab Spring
Prominent scholars have highlighted important similarities between the Arab Spring of 2011 and the “revolutions” of 1848: Both waves of contention swept with dramatic speed across whole regions, but ended up yielding rather limited advances toward political liberalism and democracy. I seek to uncover the causal mechanisms that help account for these striking parallels. Drawing on my recent analysis of 1848, I argue that contention spread so quick…
The Rise of Latin America's Two Lefts
The Diffusion of Revolution
What accounts for the spread of political protest and contention across countries? Analyzing the wildfire of attempted revolutions in 1848, the present article assesses four causal mechanisms for explaining diffusion, namely external pressure from a great power (such as revolutionary France after 1789); the promotion of new norms and values—such as liberalism and democracy—by more advanced countries; rational learning from successful contention i…
Risk Taking in Latin American Economic Restructuring
Prospect theory, a psychological theory of decision making that has shed new light on foreign policy choices, maintains that people tend to take high risks when facing losses, while proceeding with great caution when anticipating gains. This article introduces prospect theory to the study of comparative politics in order to account for the bold economic policy choices that presidents made in crisis-ridden Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, and the surp…
Populism’s Threat to Democracy
How grave is the threat that populist leaders pose to democracy? To elucidate the prospects of the United States under president Donald Trump, I conduct a wide-ranging comparative analysis of populism’s regime impact in Europe and Latin America. The investigation finds that the risks have been overestimated. Populist leaders manage to suffocate democracy only when two crucial conditions coincide. First, institutional weakness, which comes in vari…
The Politics of Corruption in Latin America
The Politics of Corruption in Latin America Kurt Weyland (bio) There is a widespread impression that corruption has been on the rise in Latin America over the past 20 years. Certainly, bribery is not new to the region, but massive graft seems to have proliferated, as suggested by scandals in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and other countries. Assuming that the perception of increased corruption reflects a real change, and is not due merely…
Toward a New Theory of Institutional Change
Going beyond historical and rational choice institutionalism, this article elaborates the core of a new theory that can account for the discontinuous, disproportionate, and frequently wave like-nature of institutional change. Cognitive-psychological findings on shifts in actors' propensity for assuming risk help explain why periods of institutional stasis can be followed by dramatic breakthroughs as actors eventually respond to a growing problem …
The Diffusion of Regime Contention in European Democratization, 1830-1940
This article goes beyond the established literature’s focus on domestic conditions by examining the impact of external impulses on European democratization from 1830 to 1940. Specifically, it analyzes the diffusion of regime conflict that arose from the cross-national spread of situational judgments about the feasibility of political change: Striking precedents of regime collapse, such as the overthrow of French kings in 1830 and 1848, tended to …
Economic Voting Reconsidered
This article examines the impact of Venezuelans' economic assessments on the election of a radical reformer, President Hugo Chávez. 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 Chávez. When political judgments and issue positions are considered, people's prospective assessments retain their significant effect, wh…
Swallowing the Bitter Pill
What accounts for the surprisingly widespread popular approval that painful neoliberal reforms elicited in several Latin American countries? This article compares the explanatory power of two rival hypotheses, which draw on conventional rational choice and psychological decision theory. The compensation hypothesis claims that governments can engineer support for costly reforms by compensating the losers through targeted social benefits. The rescu…
Populism as a Political Strategy
Responding to Rueda’s questions, this essay explains the political-strategic approach (PSA) to populism and highlights its analytical strengths, which have become even more important with the emergence of populist governments across the world. PSA identifies populism’s core by emphasizing the central role of personalistic leaders who tend to operate in opportunistic ways, rather than consistently pursuing programmatic or ideological orientations.…
Latin American Neopopulism
This article assesses recent counter-intuitive arguments that political populism and economic liberalism have had unexpected affinities in contemporary Latin America. In this line of reasoning populist tactics have furthered the enactment of drastic market reform, while neoliberal attacks on established political and economic interests have strengthened the hand of personalistic, plebiscitarian leaders. I defend these arguments against critical c…
Autocratic diffusion and cooperation
This introductory essay argues that patterns of diffusion and cooperation among non-democratic regimes differ significantly in goal, mode, impulse, and scope. Autocracies that are guided by a dynamic, missionary ideology, such as interwar fascism and, less fervently, the Bolivarianism of Hugo Chávez, actively promote their new credo in a wide range of countries. Moreover, these messianic belief systems stimulate diffusion processes across the glo…
A Paradox of Success? Determinants of Political Support for President Fujimori
To what extent does a government's success in resolving a deep political and economic crisis strengthen its popular support? The Fujimori administration in Peru, which tackled both profound economic problems and a powerful guerrilla threat, constitutes a useful test case for this important question. Most observers of Peru assume that both Fujimori's success in improving the economy and in combating insurrectionary forces contributed substantially…
Social movements and the State
Neoliberalism and Democracy in Latin America
This essay argues that neoliberalism has strengthened the sustainability of democracy in Latin America but limited its quality. Drastic market reform seems to have abetted the survival of competitive civilian rule through its external and internal repercussions. By opening up Latin American countries to the world economy, neoliberalism has exposed them to more of the international pressures for preserving democracy that intensified with the end o…
The Political Fate of Market Reform in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe
Why did political leaders adopt drastic, costly neoliberal policies in a number of countries, but not in others? Why did these painful measures elicit popular support in some nations, while triggering rejection and protest elsewhere? To complement extant explanations for these puzzling developments, the article draws on the core finding of prospect theory, a psychological theory of decision making under risk: people tend toward bold, risky choice…
Limitations of rational-choice institutionalism for the study of Latin American politics
The Diffusion of Innovations
In the age of globalization countries pay considerable attention to policy innovations developed in other, especially neighboring, countries. New models that boldly trans form established policy approaches often serve as especially powerful sources of inspiration. For instance, the system of social protection pioneered by Bismarck in Germany prompted other European countries to introduce similar schemes; in subse quent decades this innovation spr…
Crafting Counterrevolution
This article examines a neglected topic, the imposition of counterrevolution. Whereas revolution can sweep across whole regions like a tsunami, reaction tends to advance gradually, country by country. As these differences suggest, counterrevolution unfolds in a more deliberate and systematic fashion than revolution, which is fueled by the rash, ill-considered belief that the tsunami's trigger-the striking overthrow of a longstanding ruler by mass…
The Rise and Fall of President Collar and its Impact on Brazilian Democracy
In May 1992, Pedro Collor de Mello accused his brother and then-president of Brazil, Fernando Collor de Mello, of involvement in an extensive corruption scheme operated and directed by his former campaign manager, Paulo César Farias. Pressured by opposition forces, the Brazilian Congress set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the widely publicized charges. Despite a combination of both passive resistance and active harassment on the part o…
Social movements and the State
Politician's Dilemma
Latin America's Four Political Models
Latin America’s Four Political Models Kurt Weyland (bio) The democratic wave that has swept Latin America since the mid-1970s poses some important questions: How have thinkers in the region adapted the principles of democracy to the specific problems and needs of their underdeveloped continent? What models of democracy have Latin American theorists developed? What social and political forces have embraced these different models and tried to insti…
The Americanist Bias in Organization Theory
Democracy Without Equity
Development, Democracy, and Inequity
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How Much Political Power do Economic Forces Have? Conflicts Over Social Insurance Reform in Brazil
The failure of attempts at neoliberal social security reform in Brazil since 1990 demonstrates the limited political influence of seemingly powerful economic forces, especially private business and international financial institutions. Besides power-dispersing constitutional structures, the fragmentation of social forces, the weakness of political parties, and the internal segmentation of the state apparatus have hindered the efforts of Brazilian…
Risk Taking in Latin American Economic Restructuring
Prospect theory, a psychological theory of decision making that has shed new light on foreign policy choices, maintains that people tend to take high risks when facing losses, while proceeding with great caution when anticipating gains. This article introduces prospect theory to the study of comparative politics in order to account for the bold economic policy choices that presidents made in crisis-ridden Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, and the surp…
Obstacles to Social Reform in Brazil's New Democracy
This article analyzes the impact of democracy on social equity.' Specifically, why has Brazil's recent transition to democracy not enabled the large number of poor people to use their new rights of participation to press successfully for social reform? And why have politicians and state officials who have advanced equity-enhancing proposals been unable to carry them out? An analysis of policymaking in social security suggests that the institution…
Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America
“Growth With Equity” in Chile's New Democracy
The new democracy in Chile provides an interesting test case for two influential lines of thinking on Latin American political economy. Both these perspectives have claimed that the recently installed civilian regimes would find it exceedingly difficult to effect equity-enhancing change. One hypothesis has stressed the impediments posed by a capitalist free-market system to measures favoring the poor. The other has emphasized the obstacles presen…
People in Political Science
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Political Fate of Market Reform in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe
Why did political leaders adopt drastic, costly neoliberal policies in a number of countries, but not in others? Why did these painful measures elicit popular support in some nations, while triggering rejection and protest elsewhere? To complement extant explanations for these puzzling developments, the article draws on the core finding of prospect theory, a psychological theory of decision making under risk: people tend toward bold, risky choice…
Peasants or Bankers in Venezuela? Presidential Popularity and Economic Reform Approval, 1989-1993
How do people's assessments of past and future economic conditions affect their political judgments and choices, especially their evaluation of drastic market-oriented reform and its initiator? Drawing on survey re sults from Venezuela for the period from 1989 to 1993, this article finds that prospective pocketbook assessments of the economy had a signifi cant impact on presidential popularity and on public approval of neoliberal adjustment. Vene…
The Politics of Corruption in Latin America
The Politics of Corruption in Latin America Kurt Weyland (bio) There is a widespread impression that corruption has been on the rise in Latin America over the past 20 years. Certainly, bribery is not new to the region, but massive graft seems to have proliferated, as suggested by scandals in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and other countries. Assuming that the perception of increased corruption reflects a real change, and is not due merely…
From Leviathan to Gulliver? The Decline of the Developmental State in Brazil
This article advances an institutionalist explanation for the decline of Brazil's developmental state, showing how an initially strong state undermined its own strength over time. The Brazilian state greatly expanded its interventionism and fragmented society—through state‐corporatist mechanisms—in order to enhance its power to guide development. Yet the mushrooming state apparatus increasingly lacked internal coordination. This disunity diminish…
Swallowing the Bitter Pill
What accounts for the surprisingly widespread popular approval that painful neoliberal reforms elicited in several Latin American countries? This article compares the explanatory power of two rival hypotheses, which draw on conventional rational choice and psychological decision theory. The compensation hypothesis claims that governments can engineer support for costly reforms by compensating the losers through targeted social benefits. The rescu…
The Brazilian State in the New Democracy
How does a country's transition to democracy affect the state? This question is of great importance, given the crucial role that the state has played in the economic, social, and political development of most countries affected by the "third wave" of democratization. Yet this topic has received insufficient scholarly attention. Indeed, definitional assumptions may make this question appear a non-issue: because the state is regarded as more perman…
Neoliberal Populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe
How do democracies enact drastic market reforms that impose considerable shortterm costs on large sectors of the population? What tactics do political leaders use to make such painful measures, which could trigger unrest and endanger democratic stability, politically viable? In addressing these important questions, some authors have resorted to the concept of populism. Roberts and Weyland have claimed an unexpected compatibility of populist polit…
Economic Policy in Chile's New Democracy
The Aylwin and Frei administrations have taken a cautious approach in formulating economic policies. This article analyzes how they have maintained economic stability, fueled sustained growth, and coped with inflows of foreign capital. While achieving successes in macroeconomic policy, export development, and poverty alleviation, Chile also faces challenges, including high social inequality and the increasing difficulty of dealing with the effect…
A Paradox of Success? Determinants of Political Support for President Fujimori
To what extent does a government's success in resolving a deep political and economic crisis strengthen its popular support? The Fujimori administration in Peru, which tackled both profound economic problems and a powerful guerrilla threat, constitutes a useful test case for this important question. Most observers of Peru assume that both Fujimori's success in improving the economy and in combating insurrectionary forces contributed substantially…
Os riscos na reestruturação econômica da América Latina
A Teoria Prospectiva, teoria psicológica de tomada de decisões que lançou uma nova luz sobre as escolhas em política externa, sustenta que as pessoas tendem a correr grandes riscos quando encontram perdas, enquanto que, quando antecipam ganhos, tendem a proceder com grande cautela. Este artigo introduz a teoria prospectiva ao estudo de política comparada para explicar as arrojadas escolhas da política econômica de presidentes em países em crise c…
La paradoja del éxito? los determinantes del apoyo político al presidente Fujimori
No presenta resumen
Clarifying a Contested Concept
Social scientists commonly encounter concepts that are unclear and contested. Authors inspired by competing theories emphasize different attributes from a complex set of defining characteristics. These differences in intension produce differences in extension as scholars apply the same term to divergent sets of cases. Therefore, it is unclear how one author's findings apply to the cases delimited by another's different definition. Conceptual disa…
Political science (85 works) · Law (70 works) · Politics (66 works) · Political economy (51 works) · Sociology (51 works) · Law (50 works) · Economics (49 works) · Democracy (40 works) · Latin Americans (31 works) · Development economics (23 works)