scholarly journals Populism and Health Policy in Latin America Comment on "A Scoping Review of Populist Radical Right Parties’ Influence on Welfare Policy and its Implications for Population Health in Europe"

Author(s):  
Mary A. Clark ◽  
Amy Patterson

This commentary focuses on Latin America, a region known for its rich variety of populist politicians and some of the most extensive welfare states in the Global South. Contemporary Latin America offers examples of left-wing and right-wing populist leaders, none of whom demonstrate the same focus on excluding immigrants from welfare state benefits as that noted by Chiari Rinaldi and Marleen Bekker in the European context. We see this contrast not because immigrants’ access to health services is less important in Latin America, but because Latin American populists are more focused on internal "enemies." The commentary concludes with observations regarding Latin American populist leaders’ handling of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Author(s):  
Andrés Mora-Ramírez

This essay offers an interpretation of the Latin America conjuncture of the last two/three years. On one hand, the conjuncture is characterized by what the analyst call de end of the progressive national and popular cycle.  On the other hand the conjuncture is marked by the electoral rising of the right wing governments and parties,they are driving the restoration of the neoliberal project in the region. We present a contextualization of this double process and its main conflict dimension and we reflect from a position of identification and critical accompaniment of the national, popular, progressive, Latin American project. We also reflect on the need of the social movements, political parties and organic intellectuals of the Latin American left wing to assume, as a task, the dispute for the political and cultural hegemony vis-a-vis of the project of reviving the neoliberalism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095892872110230
Author(s):  
Gianna Maria Eick ◽  
Christian Albrekt Larsen

The article theorises how covering social risks through cash transfers and in-kind services shapes public attitudes towards including/excluding immigrants from these programmes in Western European destination countries. The argument is that public attitudes are more restrictive of granting immigrants access to benefits than to services. This hypothesis is tested across ten social protection programmes using original survey data collected in Denmark, Germany and the UK in 2019. Across the three countries, representing respectively a social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare regime context, the article finds that the public does indeed have a preference for easier access for in-kind services than for cash benefits. The article also finds these results to be stable across programmes covering the same social risks; the examples are child benefits and childcare. The results are even stable across left-wing, mainstream and radical right-wing voters; with the partial exception of radical right-wing voters in the UK. Finally, the article finds only a moderate association between individual characteristics and attitudinal variation across cash benefits and in-kind services.


2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-117
Author(s):  
Daniel G. Kressel

AbstractThe article examines the ideological character of Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship by exploring its ties and dialogue with Francisco Franco's Spain. Known as the “Argentine Revolution,” Onganía's regime (1966-70) was, the article shows, one of the first Cold War Latin American dictatorship to overtly use Francoist ideology as its point of reference. While building on the conventional wisdom that the legacies of the Spanish Civil War informed right-wing thought in Latin America, the study then shifts its focus to Spain's 1960s “economic miracle” and technocratic state model, observing them as a prominent discursive toolkit for authoritarian Argentine intellectuals. Drawing on newly discovered correspondence and archival sources, the article first excavates the intellectual networks operating between Franco's Spain and the Argentine right during the 1950s and 1960s. Once handpicked by Onganía to design his regime, these Argentine Franco-sympathizers were to decide the character of the Argentine Revolution. Second, the article sheds light on the intimate collaboration between the two dictatorships, and further explores the reasons for Onganía's downfall. In doing so, the study adds to a burgeoning historiographic field that underscores the significance of the Francoist dictatorship in the Latin American right-wing imaginary.


2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 733-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos de la Torre

The twenty-first century could well become known as the populist century. No longer confined to Latin America or to the margins of European politics, populism has spread to Africa, Asia, and, with Donald Trump's election, to the cradle of liberal democracy. Even though it is uncertain what impact Trump's populism will have on American democracy, it is worth learning from Latin America, where populists have been in power from the 1930s and 1940s to the present. Even as Latin American populists like Juan Perón and Hugo Chávez included the poor and the nonwhite in the political community, they moved toward authoritarianism by undermining democracy from within. Are the foundations of American democracy and the institutions of civil society strong enough to resist US president Donald Trump's right-wing populism?


Author(s):  
John S. Huntington

Willis E. Stone watched aghast as mid-century liberals expanded the size and power of the federal government. Stone, a former industrial engineer and unbending anti-statist, believed this liberal surge obfuscated and abetted an imminent red tide of communism. He founded the American Progress Foundation and its flagship periodical, American Progress , to spread a hardline libertarian message, hoping to spark conservative resistance against federal power. In the pages of American Progress , Stone and a coterie of other right-wingers published conspiratorial, anti-statist diatribes and promoted Stone’s proposal, the Liberty Amendment, to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. Right-wing business owners joined the fray, sponsoring American Progress through advertisements, and over time Stone’s movement expanded to form a collaborative network with other far-right groups. This article illustrates how American Progress served as an activist and ideological nexus for the broader ultraconservative movement, which helped establish a hardline brand of libertarianism that reverberated throughout the modern American Right. Furthermore, by analysing the scope and influence of radical right-wing publications, this article provides a critical counterweight to the traditional left-wing focus of periodical studies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110660
Author(s):  
António Costa Pinto

As an authoritarian ‘gravity centre’ in the interwar period, the Portuguese New State was not the product of strong propaganda or power capacity. Its force of attraction derived, essentially, from having an international means of diffusion: important segments of the Catholic Church's organizations, its associated intellectual politicians, and particularly from having led a corporatist and authoritarian political system model. How and why did Salazar's New State inspire some of the new political institutions proposed by radical right-wing elites or created by many of these regimes? This article tackles this issue by adopting a transnational and comparative research approach, paying particular attention to the primary mediators of its diffusion and analyzing institutional reform processes in selected processes of crises and transitions to authoritarianism in Latin America.


Author(s):  
Marisa von Bülow

Latin American transnational social movements (TSMs) are key actors in debates about the future of global governance. Since the 1990s, they have played an important role in creating new organizational fora to bring together civil society actors from around the globe. In spite of this relevance, the literature on social movements from the region focuses primarily—and often exclusively—on the domestic arena. Nevertheless, there is an increasingly influential body of scholarship from the region, which has contributed to relevant theoretical debates on how actors overcome collective action problems in constructing transnational social movements and how they articulate mobilization efforts at the local, national and international scales. The use of new digital technologies has further blurred the distinction among scales of activism. It has become harder to tell where interpretative frames originate, to trace diffusion paths across national borders, and to determine the boundaries of movements. At the same time, there are important gaps in the literature, chief among them the study of right-wing transnational networks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina J. Mayer ◽  
Carl C. Berning ◽  
David Johann

This paper offers an explanation of the link between grandiose narcissism and support for radical right parties. Drawing on representative data of the GESIS Panel ( N = 2827), focusing on support for the German radical right populist party Alternative for Germany in 2016 and treating grandiose narcissism as a two–dimensional concept, it is shown that the effects of grandiose narcissism are indirect rather than direct. The paper also reveals that it is mainly narcissistic rivalry that accounts for radical right party support, whereas narcissistic admiration has a protecting relationship. Finally, our results indicate that the indirect effects of narcissistic rivalry on radical right party support via right–wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, respectively, are mediated by anti–immigrant sentiment. All in all, our results suggest that in studies on ideological orientations and voting behaviour, both dimensions of grandiose narcissism should be considered due to their contradictory relationship. Moreover, our findings indicate that the success of radical right parties might be the expression of personality dispositions of some parts of the electorate. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology


2020 ◽  
pp. 135406882092349
Author(s):  
Juliana Chueri

The literature has pointed to a change in radical right-wing parties’ (RRWPs) position regarding the welfare state. Those parties have abandoned the neoliberal approach on distributive issues and have become defenders of social expenditure for deserving groups. Nevertheless, as RRWPs have joined with right-wing mainstream parties to form governments, their distributive policy position might cause conflict in a coalition. This study, therefore, addresses this puzzle by analysing the social policy outcomes of RRWPs’ government participation. The conclusion is that those parties contribute to the welfare state retrenchment. However, policies are not affected evenly. Expenditure that targets groups regarded as undeserving by the radical right is retrenched the most.


2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (03) ◽  
pp. 80-103
Author(s):  
Melina Altamirano

ABSTRACTA significant proportion of the population in Latin America depends on the informal economy and lacks adequate protection against a variety of economic risks. This article suggests that economic vulnerability affects the way individuals relate to political parties. Given the truncated structure of welfare states in the region, citizens in the informal sector receive lower levels of social security benefits and face higher economic uncertainty. This vulnerability makes it difficult for voters to establish strong programmatic linkages with political parties because partisan platforms and policies do not necessarily represent their interests and needs. Using cross-national microlevel data, this study shows that individuals living in informality are skeptical about state social policy efforts and exhibit weaker partisan attachments. The findings suggest that effective political representation of disadvantaged groups remains a challenge in Latin American democracies.


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