Democracy in Hard Places -- Populism's Threat to Democracy: Comparative Lessons for the U.S.

Date: 

Thursday, February 28, 2019, 4:15pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

Ash Center Foyer, 124 Mount Auburn St., Floor 2, Suite 200N

Join Kurt Weyland, Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin Department of Government, in discussion. Scott Mainwaring, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies, HKS, will moderate. 

To elucidate the prospects of U.S. democracy under President Trump, this talk will analyze the regime impact of populist chief executives in Europe and Latin America. Professor Weyland's investigation finds that institutional weakness is a crucial permissive cause for democratic backsliding. Yet even in weaker institutional settings, authoritarian regression only advances under special circumstances, namely when acute yet resolvable crises or extraordinary bonanzas allow populist leaders to win overwhelming support – and then override institutional constraints. Because none of these conditions prevails in the U.S., an undemocratic involution is exceedingly unlikely.

Kurt WeylandProfessor Weyland's research interests focus on democratization and authoritarian rule, on social policy and policy diffusion, and on populism in Latin America and Europe. He has drawn on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including insights from cognitive psychology, and has done extensive field research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela. After receiving a Staatsexamen from Johannes-Gutenberg Universitat Mainz in 1984, a M.A. from UT in 1986, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991, he taught for ten years at Vanderbilt University and joined UT in 2001. He has received research support from the SSRC and NEH and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in 1999/2000 and at the Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, in 2004/05. From 2001 to 2004, he served as Associate Editor of the Latin American Research Review.

He is the author of Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela (Princeton University Press, 2002), Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sector Reform in Latin America (Princeton University Press, 2007), several book chapters, and many articles in journals such as World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Latin American Research Review, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Foreign Affairs, and Political Research Quarterly. He has also (co-)edited two volumes, namely Learning from Foreign Models in Latin American Policy Reform (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004) and, together with Wendy Hunter and Raul Madrid, Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His latest book, Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014.

This discussion is part of the Ash Center's Democracy in Hard Places Initiative, a program co-directed by Scott Mainwaring, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor of Brazil Studies, and Tarek Masoud, Professor of Public Policy and Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations. Democracy in Hard Places aims to foster social science research on democratic experiments—both successful and failed—throughout the developing world to learn how democracy can be built and maintained in a variety of terrains. The initiative's seminar series brings to campus distinguished scholars and practitioners to analyze the conditions, institutions, and behaviors that enable democracy to survive in hard places.