Can populism be undone?

Reversing populist legacies requires more than winning an election — or changing the policies. It requires rebuilding the institutions that populism spent years dismantling.

Elections end governments. They do not always end what those governments built. A previous post documented how populist rhetoric falls sharply when a populist government leaves office, while the economic and institutional policies it created tend to persist. That finding raises a harder question: under what conditions can those legacies actually be reversed?

The answer, it turns out, has less to do with policy design than with political structure — and it requires confronting an uncomfortable distinction. Populism is not, at its core, an economic problem. It is an institutional one. The bad policies follow from the institutional damage; reversing the policies without rebuilding the institutions is treating symptoms rather than causes.

Three paths to reform

There are three drivers of policy change. The first is demand-side reform: the electorate itself pushes for change, and politicians respond. The second is supply-side reform: a leader drives change that the electorate did not explicitly request. The third is historical accident — a crisis, a war, an external shock that reshuffles the political deck and creates a window for change that would otherwise remain closed.

Historical accidents are real, and their institutional consequences can be transformative precisely because they are exogenous — they sweep away existing arrangements rather than merely creating pressure to adjust them. Postwar Japan is the paradigmatic case: military defeat and Allied occupation did not just change Japanese economic policy; they dismantled the institutional order that had produced militarism, rewrote the constitutional framework, and rebuilt horizontal accountability from the ground up. The economic transformation that followed was downstream of that institutional reconstruction. Note that this approach doesn’t always work, as the new formal institutional framework must be consistent with the pre-existing informal culture and institutions. Still, the case of Japan is an illustrative example of the “accident” way of re-shaping the economic fate of a country. But such moments cannot be engineered, and they are defined by the very exogeneity that makes them effective. A government cannot manufacture its own occupation. Waiting for the equivalent of 1945 is not a reform strategy.

That leaves demand and supply — and in post-populist societies, the demand side faces a structural problem.

Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action explains why concentrated beneficiaries of populist policies — subsidy recipients, state enterprise employees, protected industries — organize effectively to defend those benefits while the diffuse majority bearing the costs remains politically inert. But the problem runs deeper than interest group politics. It reaches into the preferences of the median voter itself.

Consider Argentina. Néstor Kirchner assumed office in 2003. By the time Mauricio Macri won the presidency in 2015, twelve years of Kirchnerism had passed. A young Argentine who was eighteen when Kirchner took office was thirty when Macri won — having spent their entire adult life in an economy defined by rising inflation, expanding subsidies, capital controls, and state intervention as the baseline of normality. Not as a deviation from some remembered standard, but as the only economic reality they had ever experienced as adults. The demand for reform requires knowing, at least roughly, what one is reforming toward. When an entire generation’s economic intuitions have been formed inside a populist system, that experiential reference point simply does not exist.

This is not a peripheral observation. It is the central obstacle to demand-side reform in post-populist societies, and it is why waiting for the electorate to drive change can be waiting for something that will not come.

The supply-side leader — and his risks

If demand-side reform is structurally unlikely, the burden falls on the supply side: a political leader willing to pursue reforms that the median voter did not request and may actively resist. There are two types of political leadership. Transactional leaders respond to existing preferences, and transformational leaders attempt to reshape them. Post-populist reform, when it happens, tends to require the latter.

But this is an analytical category, not a normative one. A leader willing to go against the median voter can be a reformer or a new authoritarian. The direction of the conviction matters.

This brings us to the contemporary Latin American right. Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Javier Milei in Argentina are frequently discussed as reform-oriented alternatives to the left-leaning populism that dominated the region for two decades. They share the willingness to defy conventional political wisdom and the appetite for confrontation with established interests. But their electoral mandates deserve scrutiny. Milei won in 2023 not primarily on a libertarian mandate but on a wave of anti-caste sentiment — a generalized fury at the political class largely independent of his specific policy program. Kurt Weyland’s concept of neoliberal populism, developed to describe Fujimori’s Peru, applies here: market reform packaged in populist form, using anti-establishment rhetoric to sustain changes that a conventional technocratic government could never push through. The conviction may be genuine. The electoral vehicle was disruption, not a reform mandate — and those are not the same thing.

Populism is an institutional problem first

Rebuilding republican institutions is harder than changing policies. Policies can be reversed by decree. Courts, norms of executive restraint, and the informal rules that make institutions function cannot. And this is why the new Latin American right, despite its different ideological content, does not automatically represent a genuine reversal of populism. Bukele dismissed El Salvador’s Supreme Court and packed it with loyalists. Milei governs frequently by executive decree and has shown open contempt for congressional constraints. The policy content differs from Kirchnerism or Correísmo — but the institutional signature is recognizable. A government that concentrates executive power, marginalizes horizontal accountability, and personalizes the state is reproducing the institutional pathology of populism regardless of whether the economic program is libertarian or socialist.

The test of whether a post-populist government is genuinely reversing populism is therefore not whether its policies are better — they may well be — but whether the institutional framework it builds is more or less republican than the one it replaced. By that standard, the picture across the contemporary Latin American right is more ambiguous than its most enthusiastic supporters acknowledge.

What genuine reform requires

The conviction leader may be a necessary condition for initiating that process. But without the institutional framework to constrain and channel that conviction, the medicine risks becoming a new version of the disease. Populism, left or right, is defined not by its economic preferences but by its relationship to republican self-government. That is the standard against which post-populist reform should be judged — and it is a considerably higher bar than simply pointing to a different set of policies.

This post was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic).