The paper identifies the creation of a “new social actor” as a necessary condition of populism. This distinguishes populism from other forms of political discontent and implies that today’s predicaments of democracy cannot be captured through these lenses.
The paper establishes both the purporsive end of populism as well as its historical end, since the structural conditions that made it possible have been eroded.
Speaker: Carla Yumatle, Professorial Lecturer, Political Science Department, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina), 2024 Amalia Lacroze De Fortabat DRCLAS Visiting Scholar.
Moderator: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Speaker and Moderator Bios
Carla Yumatle teaches political theory at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She earned her PhD in Political Science from University of California, Berkeley, a Masters from London School of Economics, and a postdoc in the Political Theory Project at Brown University. She published on liberalism, pluralism and human rights. She co-edited two volumes one entitled El mundo visto desde América Latina (2024) and a forthcoming one on the recent transformations of Latin American civil society (March 2025). She is currently working on a book project on the erosion of democracy and articles on various topics such as the conception of democracy under Alfonsin’s government; the end of populism; and the reconceptualization of human rights
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
LOCATION:CGIS South, Room S216 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241015T160000Z DTEND:20241015T172000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR