ラテンアメリカ、特にアルゼンチンにおける「ネオポピユリズム」に関する一考察-同地域の「民主主義の時代」の性格解明の一助として-

「民主化」以後のラテンアメリカ政治

抄録

Latin America has entered the “Democratic Era, ” in which “democracies” are sustained in many countries. However, considerable doubts exist as regards the “quality” of some “democracies.” Influential interpretations posit that a typical pattern of “democracies with bad qualities” appears with “neopopulism.” Some suppose that that type of politics will persist in the region. Analyses of “neopopulism” (including the possibility of its recurrence) can be useful for the understanding of the present and future state of Latin American “democracies.”
Basically, there are two types of approaches to Latin American populism, which focus on the different elements of the phenomenon; the one focuses on a particular political style of the leader/mass relationship and electoral mobilization of the mass by the leader, while the structuralist school of social sciences points out that a core feature of populism (the “populist state”) was the fact that it pursued a project of capitalist development in a form of the politics based on the working-class support, which was possible by the character of the first phase of ISI. Classical populism of J. Perón, G. Vargas, or L. Cárdenas had both elements, which has made possible many definitions of populism with various combination of the two approaches mentioned above.
Facing the appearance of the leaders, such as Argentina's C. Menem or Peru's A. Fujimori, with neoliberalism (which destroyed the matrix that had characterized the populist state) and a populist political style, the stylefocused approach to populism as well as the structuralist school of social sciences tend to explain the phenomenon by the fact that Latin American societies are atomized with economic changes and neoliberal policies, although neither can adequately approaches the question whether populist-style politics will be a recurrent phenomenon in Latin America in the neoliberal era.
Recent studies on Argentina under Menem, denying the previous studies' emphasis on the rupture that Menem brought to Argentine politics, tend to point out the continuity of many political features in the period, among them the resilience of two major parties and the partisan identity of the Peronistas. Those interpretations are compatible with precipitate decline of Menem's popularity and the fact that he could not form a political party as Perón did. They also suggest that we should be cautious in explaining neopopulism with the atomization hypothesis.
The present essay's reviews of the studies suggest that a perspective that analyzes how socioeconomic features of the neoliberal era transform the party system in each country can be very valuable in understanding the new era's politics in Latin America.