doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12136 A Comparison of ‘New Institutionalized’ Populism in Venezuela and the USA Ritchie Savage Introduction What is populism? It is difficult to determine the category of political phenomena to which the term pop- ulism corresponds, yet it can be said with certainty that it is one of the most highly contested concepts that has sparked a proliferation of continually renewed debates in political theory since the 1960s. With the resurgence of Left-oriented administrations in Latin America, and the more recent European crisis, the term is steadily employed in both the media and academic circles in a way that lacks precision. Even so, the term seems to capture the essence of a type of political phenomenon that is on the rise — one which involves an appeal to the “people.” The debate about the essence of populism is an old one, in which populism is posited to correspond to a variety of political phenomena, including a type of politician, a regime or administration, a movement, a style of rhetoric, a type of discourse, or a means of mobilization. In the Latin American context, in particular, the attempt has also been made to link populism causally or historically to an outgrowth of modernization (Germani), with certain types of em- ployed economic policies (O’Donnell; Malloy), or a phenomenon that stems from problems with existing democratic institutions (V´ eliz). 1 The first historical cases that came to be referenced by the term populism were the mid-nineteenth cen- tury Russian narodnichestvo (Walicki; Worsley 1969) 2 and the US People’s Party of the 1890s. 3 From these cases the term was next employed to describe the mid- twentieth century Latin American administrations of figures such as C´ ardenas in Mexico (1934–1940), Per´ on in Argentina (1946–1955), and Vargas’s second term in Brazil (1951–1954). At this point, a stark divergence developed in the trajectory of the concept as it was utilized in reference to USA and Latin American cases. The People’s Party was a grassroots farmers’ movement whose populist “rhetoric” was described as “anti-big business” and “pitting ordinary people against elites.” The Latin American cases, although often involving a similar anti-elite rhetoric of the “people,” were asso- ciated with top-down and centralized forms of admin- istration that blended together elements of democracy, authoritarianism, and clientelism in such a way to mo- bilize the masses by bringing in unincorporated sectors of the population, while fostering multi-class coalitions (Conniff) at the same time. 4 Whereas the historians of US populism describe a continuous, although ideologically divergent, legacy of a rhetoric of the people that began with the People’s Party, Bryan, Huey Long, and Father Coughlin, extend- ing to controversial figures like McCarthy and Wallace, and still employed by a string of presidents from Nixon to Obama (Szasz; Kazin), the historians of Latin Ameri- can populism have thus far offered a different picture of a complex political phenomenon occurring in a series of fleeting outbreaks marked much more by discontinuity than continuity. 5 Following the initial wave of classical Latin American populism, there was a long phase of bureaucratic authoritarianism in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, before the rise of neopopulism, which combined the populist rhetoric of the “politics of anti-politics” and the implementation of neoliberal policy in the highly personalized and centralized administrations of M´ enem, Fujimori, Bucaram, and Collor beginning in the late 1980s (Roberts; Weyland). 6 To complicate matters further, political theorists have noticed the similarities between these instances of neopopulism in Latin America and what Taggart described as “New Populism” in particular parties and politicians emerging in Western Europe during the 1980s. 7 In the place of the transitory neopopulist moment, we have witnessed the rise of a New Left populism in the Bolivarian alliance struck between Ch´ avez, Morales, Correa, and now with Maduro carrying on the legacy of Chavismo. Also, in recent years the Tea Party has emerged in the USA, along with an exponential increase in cases characterized as populist in Europe following the economic crisis, with some countries harboring at least two competing parties or a party and an administration labeled as populist, 8 and to this we can add cases in India and Africa. For decades now, theorists of populism have sought to restrict the usage of the term in the construction of narrow and regionally-based definitions that focus on one continent while excluding all cases that correspond to others. Where some comparisons have been made between Western Europe and Latin America, or Western Europe and the USA, there is a pronounced and analytically problematic gulf that exists between Constellations Volume 21, No 4, 2014. C  2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.