Economy, Geography, Articulation: Ecosystems of Right-Wing Populism in the Global South

Benjamin Bradlow, Princeton University
Tomas Gold, Brown University

Three paradoxes emerge from the global rise of twentieth-first century populist politics. In early-industrialized countries, the role of global trade in reducing manufacturing jobs correlates with popular support for authoritarian parties. On the contrary, in primary exporting environments, commodity booms have been cited as a correlate of growth, but the working class has been largely associated with the rise of a populist left. Thus, while changes in global terms of trade have explained conservative reaction in the industrialized world, they should have led to left-wing stability in the Global South. Relatedly, an emphasis on the global nature of populist reaction also calls into question the historically shared association between working-class support and left-wing populism in the South. Finally, a third puzzle lies in the virtual lack of party structures of many right-wing populist leaders across the Global South. Even if there were a strong political economy argument explaining the structural base of populist reaction, it is not clear how leaders rapidly articulated popular support without an organizational base. To shed light over these three related puzzles, we propose an “ecosystem-based” (Tilly 1995) approach to explain the emergence of right-wing populism in the Global South. We focus on the paradigmatic case of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, which remains puzzling given that (a) Brazil’s commodity boom was limited and ended before Bolsonaro arrived to power, (b) the key swing vote was located in working-class urban peripheries, (c) Bolsonaro lacked a political party to articulate a new sociopolitical bloc. We theorize these three dimensions of populist ecosystems (economy, geography, and articulation), and explain their emergence in Brazil through the triangulation of economic data, geographic analysis of voting trends, and interviews with government and both right and left wing social movement actors. We finally illustrate our approach with other cases across the Global South.

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 Presented in Session 204. Classes and Politics: Contemporary Case Studies from the Global North to South