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The Limits of Functional Differentiation Under Populist Rule in Latin America

Aldo Mascareño*

Abstract

Populism has been one of the most outstanding features of Latin American
politics throughout the 20th century. By controlling economic and other
societal operations and by appealing to the semantic construction of the
people, populism has succeeded in shaping the Latin American variant of
functional differentiation. This process is analyzed along three phases of
Latin American history, the pre-populist age of caudillos, the classical
populism, and the neo-populism. The article concludes with a reflection on
the consequences of populism for the institutional framework in Latin
America.

Zusammenfassung

Eines der bemerkenswerten Merkmale der lateinamerikanischen Politik im

Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts ist der Populismus. Durch die Kontrolle von
wirtschaftlichen und anderen gesellschaftlichen Operationen, und durch die
Apel an die semantische Konstruktion des Volkes, war der Populismus in
der Lage, den lateinamerikanischen Weg der funktionalen Differenzierung
zu modellieren. Dieser Vorgang wird entlang dreier Phasen der
lateinamerikanischen Geschichte analysiert, die vorpopulistische Ära der
Caudillos, der klassische Populismus und der Neopopulismus. Der Aufsatz
schließt mit einer Reflexion über die Konsequenzen des Populismus für den
institutionellen Rahmen in Lateinamerika.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Latin American political systems have
experienced a neopopulist turn. Well known are the cases of Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, but the list may be enlarged with Rafael
Correa in Ecuador, Ollanta Humala in Peru and the Kirchners in Argentina.
Certainly, populism is not a new political practice in Latin America. The
historical origins of Latin American populism can be traced back to the local
caudillos in the 19th century during the years of state formation, its further
development can be observed in the clientelistic structure of mass-based political
parties in the first half of the 20th century, and crowned by the construction of
populists states, such as the Argentinean Peronismo, the Brazilian Estado Novo,

*Aldo Mascareño (PhD University of Bielefeld) is currently Research Professor at the Escuela de
Gobierno, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile [aldo.mascareno@uai.cl]. This article
was made possible thanks to financial support by the Chilean Council for Science and
Technology (Grants 1110437 and 1110428).
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the Mexican PRI, and the Peruvian APRA. The strengths of these classical
populist movements were apparently dissolved after decades of military rule
(70’s and 80’s), neoliberal experiments (90’s) and democratic institutionalizations
in countries like Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, but nowadays old-new political
leaders and movements seem to return the populist Geist in vogue.

Descriptively, what characterizes the Latin American populism (old and new) is
a semantic construction strongly supported by the notion of pueblo (the people), a
political practice of mass participation and mobilization, and an interventionist
approach especially to law and the economy. According to this, populism is not
only a strategy to take power, but in fact, a holistic design of social relations
centered on political criteria. The aim of this paper is to explore the sociological
consequences for the constitution of the functional differentiation arising from
the historical and political prevalence of populism in Latin America. My general
thesis is that through a combination of centralized structural and semantic
expectations, populism has limited the establishment of functional differentiation
in Latin America —structurally by means of an extra-political dissemination of
power that imposes severe restrictions to the autonomy of functional systems,
and semantically through a particularistic comprehension of citizenship as
pueblo.

In order to provide the central steps of this argument, I shall reconstruct —in a
rather broad periodization— three major phases of the history of populism in
Latin America with regard to the evolutionary process of concretization of
functional differentiation: caudillismo in the transition from stratification to
functional differentiation (1800-1930) (1), classical populism during the
modernization phase (1930-1970/80) (2), and neopopulism since 1980 (3). Finally, I
present some concluding remarks about the Latin American institutional
framework (5).

1. Caudillismo and the transition to functional differentiation

It is frequently assumed that the golden age of Latin American populism began
in 1930 and concluded in the 70’s with the takeover by military rule, the
neoliberal reforms in the economic system, and the democratization processes in
the 90’s (Werz 1995; Larraín 2004; Rovira 2009). This is not only a partial truth
because of the resurgence of populism in the 21st century, but also due to the old
Latin American tradition of caudillos, which since the late 18th century have
played an important role in the formation of political systems and the
administration of power.

Historically, social change from colonial to republican order, particularly during

the 18th and 19th centuries, reflects what from an evolutionary point of view can
be described as the transition from stratification to functional differentiation in
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Latin America. The monarchical centralization of the Spanish crown combined,

in the late colonial period, two forms of political administration: a formal and an
informal. The former was organized around eleven intendancies and a
superintendence both introduced by the Bourbon reforms in the 18th century.
They aimed to avoid the former fragmentation of the royal power in local units
(majors, commissars, governors) and to reinforce the hierarchy of the stratified
order, which went through a deep disintegration during the last period of the
Habsburgs (Pietschmann 1980). On the other hand, the informal administration
of power emerged as a way of controlling the vast and unknown Latin American
territories without incurring large costs of a professional military and transport.
As stated by Chevalier

the government of Madrid sometimes found it advantageous to use

powerful men so that order might be kept, even at the cost of sacrificing a
little of its sovereignty to them. Sometimes contracts of this kind were made
with rich proprietors of lands or mines, who took it upon themselves to
maintain private armies in exchange for honorary titles. (Chevalier 1992, 29)

As long as the structure of a stratified monarchical order remains in Latin

America, the colliding powers of such strongmen, the caudillos, could be kept
under control. Nonetheless, the French Revolution in Europe and the
independence movements in Latin America were two key factors for the rise of
caudillos as central political figures during the transition from stratification to
functional differentiation. Without a centralized power, or even fighting against
the monarchical authority, caudillos became an unavoidable resource toward the
construction of independent nation states. They were able to build
plurifunctional networks, which constituted the organizational basis for the
dissipative fluidity of the medium power. Caudillo-structures are a form of
segmentary differentiation (different caudillos in different territories) which
internally combines a concentric, hierarchical character with functional roles. At
the center, strict couplings between economic (primarily land-based production
in the hacienda) and political functions (military defense of property and
territories) could be found. Supporting this center, an indeterminate number of
ties are developed using diverse mechanisms —from ties of blood (extended
families, nepotism) and personal bonds (godparenthood, rewards) to
international economic benefits.

This situation has been compared with the feudal order of the European Middle
Ages (Scheina 2003). This is not truly accurate taking into account the colonial
condition of Latin America in the 18th century, the increasing expansion of
functional systems in world society at that time, and the semantic reflection on
modern values such as liberty, nation, and progress which played a pivotal role
during the wars for independence in the 19th century. Caudillos are rather a sort
of transitional species that emerges when the monarchical structure weakens and
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the republican centralization of power in a modern state is still fragile. They

make the symbolic medium power operational, so that one knows with whom
one is to deal with when it comes to political power (and also to economic
pressures). The question is how ‘transitional’ was the caudillismo?

Since the caudillo-structure was the institution where the allocation of power and
money were concentrated, the nation-building process must rely on it.
Paradoxically, caudillos were simultaneously a factor of consolidation and
instability for the emerging nation states. By financing internal and external war
campaigns and providing the state military with their followers, they became a
central actor of the republican period in the 19th century, but on the other hand,
the loyalty of their own private militias produced high doses of uncertainty:

Presidents moved in and out of office with alarming regularity as

challengers violently overthrew their opponents. Because local caudillos
commanded such loyal and efficient groups of military followers, national
armies often fractured after caudillos were forced from power by their
opponents. (Rankin 2010, 52)

The Latin American state-building process was therefore in an ambiguous

situation during the 19th century. On the one hand it aims to control power in a
formal procedural way (constitutions, parties, state bureaucracy), but on the
other it heavily relies on informal caudillo-networks. The increasing
institutionalization of power in the second half of the century does not remove
those networks; they are rather intertwined with the political system through
posts, internal colonial enterprises, commercial contracts with the state and
parliament quotas (Rankin 2010). The political system itself became a partially
differentiated system: it certainly consisted of administration, political parties
and publics, but the administration did not follow the procedural rules created
by itself, political parties became a hosting place for caudillos (namely a
combination of the particularistic interests of these strongmen with liberal
progress and conservative nationalism), and the public was highly restricted to
urban businessmen (most of them criollos), landowners (estate aristocracy), and
politicians (businessmen, landowners, and the enlightened middle class) —
excluded were indigenous people, peasants, servants, land tenants (inquilinos),
and the emerging land and urban proletariat of the export economy. This period
is called the oligarchic modernization (Halperin 1983), and the excluded ones
were, at the beginning of the 20th century as a strategy of semantic inclusion,
identified as pueblo.

2. Classical populism and popular pseudo-inclusion

In contrast to the European modernization pattern, the Latin American

modernization until the beginning of the 20th century was economically
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characterized by an integration in the world economy through exportation of

primary products (minerals and agricultural supplies) and importation of
capitals (Bulmer 2008). As a consequence of this model, industrialization was
postponed (Larraín 2004). Legally, this modernization process took place in a
highly restricted institutional milieu in which procedures were more a symbolic
fiction than an operational device (Garzón-Valdés 1997), particularly because —
from a political point of view— the parliament, the state bureaucracy and the
public sphere were dominated by a small urban middle class and a local elite
that excluded the pueblo.

The first sign of crisis of this model was the so-called social question at the turn of
the century. It reflected the consequences of a capitalist modernization without
efficient mechanisms of social inclusion. Yet, the coup de grâce to the exportation
pattern of Latin American countries were the First World War and the Great
Depression. As long as the Latin American export model could develop as an
important component of the world economy during the 19th century, the nation
state could also deal with social problems in a temporal dimension: ‘civilization
of barbarism takes time’ was the devise (Sarmiento 1945). International
commercial relations, immigration, internal colonization and civilization through
education and urbanization were public policies in many Latin American
countries during this period. They aimed to enhance not only the range of
productive activities, but also to enrich the modern character of social relations
(Alberdi 1957). Sociologically, it can be said that the envisaged plan was a forced
incorporation in the logic of functional world systems, although under two
restrictions: first, the normative (democracy, fundamental rights, rule of law) and
cognitive structures (inclusion opportunities in education, economy, health care,
technology) of functional differentiation were not fully institutionalized in the
Latin American region. And second, as a consequence, the operation of
functional differentiation was deeply intertwined with a model of stratification
characterized by a small entrepreneurial-political upper class (the elite), an
emerging but rather modest middle class, and an undefined under class group
composed of diverse social segments: land-city immigrants in marginal urban
territories, indigenous people, mestizos, small agricultural workers and a growing
number of industrial workers. As soon as the First World War and the Great
Depression broke out, they fractured the coupling between the world economy
and the Latin American export model, and consequently the exclusion problems
of the under class turned out into political praxis. This was the social milieu for
the ascent of populism.

A classical interpretation of populism in the Latin American social sciences was

given by G. Germani (1962, 1978, 1981). Following Germani, populism is
functionally equivalent to European fascism. Both of them are alternative
variants of totalitarianism. They can be distinguished from each other with
regard to the orientation of political pressures and the expectations of inclusion.
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While in Europe the status-insecurity of upper and middle classes (bourgeoisie)

was activated by the political organization and mobilization of the working class
and the reduced savings, real incomes and inflation of the war economy, in Latin
America —as a consequence of the stratified model of functional inclusion in
which upper classes monopolize positions and opportunities in the economic
and political systems— the lower class was also mobilized, but they were a
rather uneducated, unprofessional and politically inexperienced group. Under
these circumstances, social mass mobilization plays a significant role:

In Europe the working class had been politically organized for a long time
and was historically associated with a progressive ideology: the only
‘available’ masses were the displaced middle-class groups, which included
enough people for a mass movement, though less than a majority of the
population […] In Latin America the incongruent sectors of the middle class
were small, but the support of recently mobilized lower groups was
available to them, and this required a ‘populist’, ‘social justice’ ideology.
(Germani 1981: 182)

The European totalitarianism (fascism) was inclined to avoid a revolutionary

ending of the lower class mobilization, and to recover the national influence in
political world affairs, while the Latin America totalitarianism (populism) had to
modify the political and economic structures in order to keep the newly
mobilized lower classes under control and adapt itself to an era of increasing
internationalization. Therefore, what fascism and populism share is, following
Germani, a need for de-mobilization:

The examples given above —Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile— best
fit the model of what I call ‘functional substitutes of fascism’, insofar as
while they all show significant differences with the classic ideal type, they
have in common what is at least one of its basics aims, namely, the forced
demobilization of the recently mobilized lower classes. (Germani 1978: 73)

There is not a single description of what classical populism comprises (De la

Torre 1992; Panizza 2005). Sociologically however, Germani’s explanation is the
most accepted. With regard to the institutionalization process of functional
differentiation in Latin America, I would like to put forward Germani’s
argument in structural and semantic terms. From a structural-political point of
view, charismatic leaders who establish a mimetic relationship with the public
characterize Latin American populism. The leader does not represent the public;
the leader is the public. On the other hand, the public is regarded as a unified
mass comprehended under the semantic category of pueblo —there is no internal
differentiation among the pueblo, but it has certainly two common enemies who
kept their multiple components integrated: the national oligarchy and the
imperialistic power in world society, US-American, in particular (Werz 1995: 87).
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In economic terms, Latin American populism aimed to control market operations

by introducing political plans of production, improving working conditions and
supporting with monetary, legal and political resources the import substitutive
industrialization as an economic response to the crisis of the export model.
Concerning Peron’s government in Argentina between 1946 and 1955, T. Leonard
(2010, 16) expresses the core of the populist approach to the economy: “As
president, Perón capitalized on his charisma to implement a corporate state,
uniting the nation’s three economic sectors —agriculture, industry, and labor—
under government control”. As a consequence, “both middle and working
classes regarded the state as the shaping force of society […] it was at the level of
the state where negotiations among different groups took place and where the
approved policies to favor each party were enacted” (Larraín 2004, 131, 133). The
state became the semantic representation of the unity of Latin American society
under populist rule —an elision, though not the dissolution, of the stratified
model of functional inclusion through the pseudo-universality of the pueblo.

Finally, in legal-constitutional terms, the populist situation is extremely

paradoxical. On the one side, it expressively assumes a defense of the poor and
the construction of a sense of belonging to a national project among the lower
classes. An analysis of that time, C. Beals (1934) summarizes the program of
Peruvian APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) —one of the most
important populist parties throughout the 20th century:

The general thesis was anti-imperialism; war upon all feudalism, therefore
upon landholders, the Church and militarism; the simultaneous building
up of native private and state capitalism, with bonafide collectivism
whenever and wherever possible; rapid education to provide a true
national basis for political stability; the freeing of Indians from pseudo-
serfdom; the enforcement of an enlightened labor code. The ultimate goal
was to be democratic collectivism. (Beals 1934, 243)

This in part nationalistic, in part liberal, in part communitarian catalogue of

rights was central to populism, since it had to cope not only with a proletarian
under class, but also with a diversity of excluded groups gathered under the
denomination of pueblo —in which even middle class workers as well had a
place. However, since all of these rights (national self-determination, economic
freedom, education, political participation, labor dignity) are deemed to be
realized by a corporate (and not a liberal-democratic) state (‘bonafide
collectivism’, ‘democratic collectivism’), no independent legal procedures could
exercise a supervisory control over the fulfillment of the normative expectations
produced. In addition, the caudillo-like, clientelistic political pattern of populism
is based on the model of votes or favors against the delivery of goods and
services, which creates extended, informal exchange networks that introduce
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deep inequalities in the structure of rights by benefiting the members and

depriving the non-members from access to the state services (De la Torre 1992).

Such ambiguous operations concerning political and social rights are well
summed up by Germani with regard to the Argentinean case. While results were
negative in terms of structural changes, popular self-consciousness grew up
under populist rule: “In this vein, we cannot speak —as in the case of the
German and Italian middle classes— of ‘substitutive satisfactions’, because these
achievements —although psychosocial and non-structural in nature— are related
with their ‘true goals’ in the corresponding socio-historical situation” (Germani
1962, 250).

Taking all this into account, namely the mimesis between leader, state and pueblo,
the state control of private and public economic activities, the inward-looking
pseudo-egalitarian nationalism, the reconstruction of international relations as
populism against imperialism, and the ambiguity regarding the fulfillment of
fundamental rights, Latin American populism is more than just a form of
structuring the political system. It is rather a state-centered configuration of
functional differentiation, a top-down mode of shaping society characterized by
an extra-political dissemination of power that instrumentalizes the autonomy of
functional systems through multiple forms of de-differentiation. The question
rises if the Latin American neopopulist movements of the 21st century can also be
described that way.

3. Neopopulism and corruption

In a recent essay on populism in comparative perspective, K. Hawkins (2010) has

analyzed —through multiple quantitative indicators— five different arguments
on the causes of contemporary populism worldwide. The first one is what he
calls economic voting. This argument relates the emergence of populism with a
consistently bad economic performance carried out by traditional political parties
— indicator here is the GDP. The mass-society argument put the emphasis on the
ability of populist leaders to make use of classic and, particularly, new electronic
media to create a charismatic bond with non-educated citizens —in order to test
this argument there are three indicators: availability of television-sets, media
freedom, and level of enrollment in secondary education. The modernization
argument relies on a deficient industrialization that cannot successfully confront
the new challenges of globalization —union density was taken up as indicator.
The dependency argument prognoses a resurgence of populism on countries with
a commodity-based economy controlled by foreign companies —indicator here
combines foreign direct investment and type of exports (commodities/all
exports). And finally, the normative argument connects the emergence of
populism with a failing rule of law —perceived and experienced corruption are
the indicators. After analyzing these variables and acknowledging the
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methodological problems in constructing the measurements (lack of observations

and of comparable data among countries), Hawkins concludes that

Corruption is the best predictor of populism across all of the statistical

models, even when we take a large number of variables into account and
lose some of our observations. In contrast, poor economic growth by itself is
not a strong predictor of populism once we take corruption into account,
suggesting that economic voting is not the principal cause of populism […].
And neither economic dependency nor an unfavorable combination of
electronic media access and low levels of education can predict populism,
suggesting that dependency theory and mass-society theory are even
poorer explanations for populism. Changes in union density have a
stronger relationship with populism even after we take other variables into
account, giving some credence to structuralist (modernization) theories of
populism, but these results are not confirmed once we look at alternative
indicators of union density with larger numbers of observations. Finally, we
find evidence of a strong interaction effect between corruption and
economic policy failure that fits the predictions of our theory, showing that
economic growth really matters for populism only when it occurs in an
environment of high corruption. (Hawkins 2010, 159-160)

Hawkins himself advocates for what he calls a normative theory of populism,

namely the fact that populist movements and a populist discourse emerge when
there is “a widespread failure of government to implement rights of citizenship,
particularly the rule of law, that allow citizens to characterize their governments
as corrupt” (Hawkins 2010, 6). Populist movements would have taken advantage
of this institutional and personal corruption in public affairs by constructing a
moral code according to which the Evil is a conspiring political elite that makes
use of the state to its own benefit, and the Good is the subverted will of the ‘pure,
simple, selfless and hard-working’ people. Under these circumstances, populism
portrays itself as the will of the people and unifies under the Good the diversity
of those who have been affected by the corrupt Evil.

If the promises of neopopulism are the fight against a corrupted elite and the
inclusion of people into the outcomes of social systems, a decrease would be
expected in the perception of corruption in those countries under populist rule.
Graphic 1 illustrates this for selected Latin American countries during the last
decade.

GRAPHIC 1 INSERT HERE

Since 1999, Venezuela is a paradigmatic case of neopopulism under the Hugo

Chávez regime. Instead of decreasing, the perception of corruption during the
first decade of the 21st century is poorer than it was at the beginning of Chávez’
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government. Something similar can be said in the case of Peru. Throughout

Alejandro Toledo’s administration (2001-2006) people consistently perceived
more corruption; this changes slightly with the liberal policies of ex-APRA Alan
García (2006-2011). The oscillation between 3.0 and 2.0 of Argentina and Ecuador
reveals a rather stagnant situation. From this group of countries with
neopopulist-oriented governments, actually Bolivia under Evo Morales (in office
since 2006) is the only one achieving better results —although not impressive
ones. Yet, all of them are placed in the lower half of the scale, with Chile being
the only country in Latin America over 7.0 points —but with a small reduction
during Michelle Bachelet’s administration (2006-2009).

Following Hawkins (2010), neopopulism presents itself as the Good (will of the
people) against the corrupt Evil. This might well be, but populism fails in
reducing the perception of corruption. The problem with the normative
argument is that it understands corruption mainly in moral terms, as a linguistic
construction in discourses—as E. Laclau does (2005). This could be a plausible
explanation of the emergence of the moral codification of politics. Yet, corruption
is not only a moral phenomenon —it is primarily a matter of exclusion situations
and inclusion opportunities that directly affects the daily experience and actions
of people when confronted with public and private institutions. As Table 1
shows, the perception of corruption is not only attributed to Latin American
politics and politicians, but to a wide range of functional systems.

TABLE 1 INSERT HERE

From a functional point of view, corruption means systemic de-differentiation,

i.e. the operational intervention of one system in the code-operations of one
another —e.g. bribery (money in exchange for binding decisions in politics or the
legal system), nepotism (intimacy in public procedures), extortion (extra-legal
influence or coercion in different fields), favoritism (personal ties in procedural
contexts), reputation (transfer of symbolic meanings attributed to persons from
one field to another, such as politicians in the academy, media performers in
politics). Elsewhere (Mascareño 2012), I have defined the de-differentiation
problems in Latin America as temporarily episodic and socially limited. That
means, they are not permanent and also not in the same manner extended to all
kinds of social relations —as illustrated in Table 1. De-differentiation events
come and go. In all of the countries displayed in the Table, either populist-
oriented (Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela) or democratic-liberal (Brazil,
Chile, Colombia), such events are concentrated in the political (parties,
parliament, police, public officials —less in the military) and in the legal system
(judiciary), and reveal a rather discrete character (although always over the
average of 2.5) in ‘private systems’, such as education, media, NGOs, and
religion —with the exception of the economic system (business), ranging over 3.0
points.
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Certainly, much of these figures contain transitive corruption acts between alter
and ego, namely between public officials and economic actors, or between
political parties, police and the judiciary. That fact illustrates the systemically
overlapping nature of corruption, i.e. there is no corruption inside the system, but
always in contact with an external operation that limits the internal expectations
to operate with its own code. Market becomes black market as long as legal
operations communicate its illegality, and legal operations will not communicate
this when (black) money, coercion, political influence or favoritism succeed in
stopping that legal procedure (Pritzl 1997); political negotiations turn into cold
strategy when examined with the eyes of intimacy, but when intimacy intervenes
in politics, accusations of nepotism or intimate scandals are easily proven
(Thompson 2000); the police may assure an acceptable level of crime through
negotiations with robbery gangs for the release of city zones from police control
and, at the same time, finance their own activities by demanding money from
criminals (Dewey 2011). Precisely because de-differentiation problems are
morally rejected and thus hidden behind a fiction of proceduralism or behind the
moral superiority of the semantic construction of pueblo, as neopopulism does,
many of such events cannot be experienced at all by individuals or organizations.
They remain publicly underexposed but functioning as fundamental
mechanisms in reshaping through informal networks, charisma, personal ties,
coercion and a moral conviction of revealed truth, the form and outcomes of
functional differentiation in Latin America.

4. Institutional consequences

The rise of functional differentiation in world society is not only a structural

phenomenon; it implies also a process of stabilization of a set of normative and
cognitive expectations for which different institutional frameworks are required.
In the case of normative expectations, institutions are needed which can
effectively deal with the disappointments and compensate the losses individuals
may experience in their interaction with functional systems (fundamental rights,
rule of law, public policies, barriers to exclusion transfers —Stichweh 2005). In
the case of cognitive expectations, the institutional framework must offer a set of
alternative options to which individuals may have a rapid and easy access when
their own preferences were wrong or simply do not work anymore —market and
job alternatives, technical choices, types of professional instruction, knowledge-
based information in media, health care, schooling, market operations, science
(Luhmann 2005).

Since the era of caudillos until neopopulism, there has been a gap in Latin
America between formal institutions and societal expectations. On the one hand,
a modern, normative and cognitive institutional framework does emerge in the
19th century and develop all along the modernization process in a permanent
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interplay with world society. On the other hand, that framework also raises
expectations that remain frequently unprocessed, particularly those related to
land-city immigrants, indigenous people, agricultural workers, a growing
number of industrial workers, urban marginal population and an ascending but
deprived middle class. They were (and are) the target of populism.

In order to create a bond with them and their expectations, they were
fictionalized by populism under the category of pueblo. In the pueblo everyone
—except the enemies— is included. Yet, the most important outcome of this
category is that it represents a form of self-legitimization. Populism gives the
name, and justifies itself by that name given. Acting in the name of the pueblo
does not allow, but demands a political reorganization of society without a major
consideration of the central premises of liberal democracies, such as fundamental
rights or the rule of law. Both of them might be certainly accepted, but only as
long as they symbolize the will of the people. That is the reason why to many
populist regimes there is an urge toward the foundational act of a new
Constitution (1999 in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, 2009 in Ecuador under
Rafael Correa, 2009 in Bolivia under Evo Morales) and the concentration of
powers in the executive (veto powers, state of emergency, control of economy
and industry, development of technology, formation of workers, jurisdiction
over higher education and cultural matters —see particularly Venezuela’s and
Bolivia’s Constitutions).

The degradation of fundamental rights directly affects the preservation of

functional differentiation. In Luhmann’s words: “[the fundamental rights] avoid
the orientation of all the communications to the particular goals of the state
bureaucracy, enabling thus a rationalization of these goals towards specific
functional performances” (Luhmann 1999: 23). In replacing the functional
position of fundamental rights by the category of pueblo, populist regimes are
able to concentrate operational decisions of other systems under political criteria,
limiting thus their autonomy, even in constitutional terms. In doing so, an extra-
political dissemination of the medium power takes place, producing in this way
a concentric institutional layout of functional differentiation in Latin America
that normatively politicize the whole social order and de-cognitivize cognitively
based functional systems such as economy, science, education, media and
technology. On the one hand, this means that the normative institutional
framework (politics, judiciary, police) conditionalize the communicative
processing of normative expectations to populist, political affinities; on the other,
the cognitive institutional framework (economy, education, science) loses
alternatives and efficiency as long as the available options must be, first, reduced
to those politically accepted, and, second, processed and approved by the state
bureaucracy. Mechanisms to implement this extra-political dissemination of
power under populist rule are diverse. They comprise the Bolivarian Missions (a
corporatist-like method of policies) and the state control of the economy in
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Venezuela (Hawkins 2010), clientelistic networks in education and health care in

Ecuador (De la Torre 2000), non-procedural targeted social spending and
coercion through the military in Peru (Crabtree 2000), inflation and external debt
default as in Argentina (Ferguson 2008), and the overarching appeal to the pueblo
in each case (Cammack 2000; Panizza 2005).

More than a political style, a social movement, a redemption of the poor, a

discourse of, for and by the people, populism is rather a structural and semantic
societal design that, at least since the first half of the 20th century, at most since
the late 18th century with the caudillos, has shaped and reshaped the form of the
functional differentiation in Latin America. It is indeed not the only particular
feature of the Latin American variant of functional differentiation, but certainly
the most outstanding one.

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