Introduction

The study of populism has been prolific in recent decades, and much has been elaborated and discussed about its characteristics and consequences. Neither populism nor its empirical manifestations, which have been present in the Latin American region since the 20th century and are currently expanding globally, is a new subject for academia or for public debate. Far from considering that everything has been said and consensus has been reached, the debate remains wide open. This book, however, is not (only) about populism. The focus is fundamentally on the voice of the people in contemporary democracies, which forces us to talk about populism, the most powerful and radical response that has been put on the table supposedly to resolve the challenges of including the will of the citizenry.

In The Will of the People: Democracy and political participation in Latin America I argue that citizens' diminished role in decision-making is to a good extent responsible for the global decline in support for democracy, but also has consequences on the quality and accuracy of public policies. In presenting the argument, I analyse ideas and historical experiences around the role of citizens in different political regimes, with a particular focus on past and recent Latin American cases. The topic is critical, considering that contemporary new and old democracies - and even non-democratic regimes - challenged by growing citizen dissatisfaction are experiencing a shift towards the inclusion of citizen participation (effective or not), while at the same time populism is growing, fuelling a tension between different views of democracy.

The study of populism was for decades concentrated in the countries of South America.1 In the mid-twentieth century, research and essays focused on the figures of presidents Juan Domingo Perón (1946?-?1955 and 1973?-?1974) in Argentina and Getulio Vargas (1930?-?1945, 1951?-?1954) in Brazil, as central references. Later, with the emergence of combined agendas such as populism with a right-wing agenda or the shrinking of the state, the focus expanded to include Carlos Saúl Menem (1989?-?1999), again in Argentina, and Alberto Fujimori (1990?-?2000) in Peru. By the 1990s, Hugo Chávez (1999?-?2013) inaugurated a new era in Venezuela whose wake was followed by other countries, especially Ecuador with Rafael Correa (2007?-?2017). But entry into the 21st century has considerably expanded the area of influence of populist leaderships, although it has also contributed to blurring the limits of the concept, quite often in public debates without a clear definition, referring to any leader with authoritarian features. But more productive than to restrain the discussion to what fits and what does not could be to analyse the conditions for democracy to work well. A broader understanding of what democracy means and how it is built is an ambitious goal of this book.

At the beginning of 2021, populisms became more common and more diverse in their features, with the emergence of right-wing populist leaders. One example of this is the National Front in France, founded in 1972 by Jean Marie Le Pen and now led by his daughter, Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen modernised the style and rhetoric of the party but without losing its anti-immigration and Eurosceptic goals. The United Kingdom Independence Party in the United Kingdom, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden and Fidez in Hungary are also examples of these trends.2 The puzzle facing us is why have populist parties become so much stronger in recent years in so many distinct corners of the globe? What are the main reasons for the rise of populist parties? Why is populism growing? But it is also important to acknowledge that they could be less prominent than feared and the populists are also likely to decline.3 The cases of the Americas offer special insights on the topic. The emergence of Donald Trump and his arrival to the presidency (2017?-?2020) has generated many comments on his insomniac use of social media to attack and spread misinformation.4 However, to focus almost exclusively on Trump's personal attributes and actions is unproductive if one seeks to develop strategies that allow for democratic contestation for popular support on the basis of a political project. This is the fundamental challenge: populism arises in democratic contexts and it is in this sense that it should not be confused with pure dictatorship neither confronted from the ideological defence of elitist models.

Populist leaders claim that they promote and express real democracy, and it emerges in contexts of electoral competition. What happens with these competitive scenarios once populist leaders come to power is a different matter. Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela did not win elections in good faith, nor does his discourse, a ghostly and degraded imitation of the man who placed him in the presidential succession, Hugo Chávez, sustain him in power. Maduro is an authoritarian leader and Venezuela is an autocracy.5 The government maintains power through co-optation and coercion, and although it still has some popular support, it is authoritarian procedures and not those of electoral democracy that explain the regime's survival. It is fundamental to understand that, although some populist leaders pave the way for changing legal frameworks and destroying or co-opting institutional checks and balances, the media and any opposition, inside or outside the party, they accomplish this through procedures that to a good extent are based on the rules of electoral democracy. Why do people accept this? There are many reasons, not least of all are the deficits of the political systems in terms of legitimacy as well as in the provision of public goods. It is in this framework that the emergence of populist proposals should be reflected upon, because what populisms do is highlight these deficits: inequality, the erosion of the common project that sustained the welfare state or its expectation, attachment to traditional values (populisms have been framed in patriarchal values); the prevalent forms of communication based on appealing to emotions and urgency, and growing distance between political adversaries; and - of particular interest here - the democratic deficit evident in the prevailing type of citizen participation, in the erosion of social cohesion and the pillars of a political community.

The aim of this book is to better understand how democracy is defined throughout history, why it presents so many challenges in the 21st century, the conditioning factors of the emergence of populist leaders and, subsequently, their link with the mechanisms of citizen participation. Understanding these challenges is necessary to enrich the approach with more operative dimensions when seeking responses to this pressing problem, or, in other words, what matters most is to have a clear and democratic political response that is able to reinforce democracy. The discussion of the mechanisms of citizen participation and the relationship that populist governments have had with them seeks, in turn, to highlight the fact that the "will of the people" that these leaders claim to represent does not correspond to their procedures when it comes to incorporating the voice of the citizenry. The volume deals with the following questions: What does real democracy mean? What have different actors - leftist parties, populist leaders, elites, traditional parties and the feminist movement - done regarding the crisis of democracy? And what is needed to make democracy work better?

These reflections are structured along eight chapters and a final reflection. The first one, What does 'real democracy' mean? focuses on the ideas and historical experiences around the role of citizens in political regimes. The chapter is drawn along selected historical events to trace the notion of democracy, including failed experiences of direct participation, and the current debate over the conditions for the inclusion of mechanisms of direct participation. In doing so, this chapter helps build the main argument to be developed through the book, i.?e. that the citizenry's diminished role in decision-making explains to a good extent the decline of support for democracy. It invites us to rethink institutions and narratives of the common good, because more voices may not be sufficient to improve democracy, and may even have the opposite effect.

Chapter 2, Participatory myths: promotion by the left and a 'natural' evolution, starts by analysing a tension that dominated most of the 20th century regarding participation: the concept conceived by the West as 'authoritarian-participation' when confronted with their own model of 'democratic-representation'. It began to crack in the 1970s and even more so with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s. Through diffusion or zeitgeist (the spirit of the time), diverse mechanisms of participation and citizen control have since then expanded in various parts of the world. The promoters of such democratic innovations expect to complement and enrich electoral representation as a way of deepening democracy. However, results are not always so positive, and there is not a clear path of participatory democracy development. This deserves to be clarified, because, despite a general diffusion, the idea remains that the left has been more inclined than political parties on the right to introduce mechanisms of citizen participation and include citizens' voices. Meanwhile, some...