4 MARLAS v.1, n.1, p. 4-29 Jan-Jun 2017 Populist Citizenship in the Bolivarian Revolutions Carlos de la Torre University of Kentucky Abstract: This article analyzes the contours of populist citizenship as an alternative to neoliberal models of citizenship as consumption, and to liberal models that protect pluralism. It compares how political, socioeconomic, civil, collective, gender, and GLBT rights were imagined and implemented in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It explains why despite the expansion of some rights, populists’ use of discriminatory legalism to regulate the public sphere and civil society led to the displacement of democracy toward authoritarianism. Key words: citizenship, populism, rights, democratization, authoritarianism. Populism is a form of political incorporation to the political community based on rhetorical appeals to and the mobilization of the people (de la Torre 2000). Populists use a Manichaean rhetoric that confronted the people against the oligarchy understood as self-serving and foreign- oriented elites that marginalized the plebs from political, socioeconomic, and symbolic resources and benefits. Populist challenges to the exclusion of the people, and their promises of inclusion and even redemption took place during episodes of mobilization and contentious collective action (Jansen 2015). During populist events the meanings of the term “the people” and who belonged to this category are contested. Several actors such as politicians, activists, and leaders of social movements claim to be the voice of the people. Politics becomes a struggle over who could claim to talk on behalf of the people and to represent their interests. Populism is also a model of citizenship conceived as the active participation of the people in politics (Spanakos 2008; Rein 2013). Populists mobilize their followers and occupy public spaces. Classical populist of the 1930s and 1940s like Juan Perón and José María Velasco Ibarra struggled against electoral fraud and to expand the franchise. Free and open elections became the decisive moment of the populist representative contract (Peruzzotti 2013: 75).