About

Kurt Weyland is a Professor and the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts. His academic focus includes democratization and authoritarian rule, social policy and policy diffusion, and populism in Latin America and Europe. His work involves analyzing political processes and institutions, with particular attention to the dynamics of democratization and authoritarianism, as well as the spread of policies across different contexts. As a distinguished scholar, he contributes to understanding the political developments and challenges within these regions, providing insights into the mechanisms of political change and stability.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Public administration
• Library science
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Populism as a political strategy

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-03-12 · 7 citations

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  This chapter presents the political-strategic approach to populism in its conceptual development and theoretical provenance, especially its roots in Weber’s analysis of charismatic leadership. I consider recent contributions and examine the approach’s advantages vis-à-vis alternative frameworks, especially the broad, heterogeneous set of ideational and discursive approaches. Subsequent sections highlight the political-strategic approach’s special benefits during the current wave of populism. Now that in so many countries populist leaders have become chief executives, it is especially important to go beyond investigations of populists’ rhetorical appeals and understand how they actually govern, extend their power and thus endanger liberal democracy. Demonstrating its heuristic value, the political-strategic conceptualization suggests many conjectures and hypotheses about these topics. Most importantly, populist leaders incessantly challenge and threaten democracy - but they manage to do serious damage to liberal pluralism only under specific, restrictive conditions. Thus, populism’s effective threat to democracy is not as severe as recent observers fear.

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• Opposition to populist backsliding: conditions, limitations, and opportunities

  Democratization · 2024-09-29 · 11 citations

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• External Pressures and International Norms in Latin American Pension Reform

  2024-01-01 · 8 citations

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  Abstract What accounts for the striking of wave of pension privatization that swept across Latin America during the 1990s? Many authors argue that the international financial institutions (IFIs) successfully promoted this drastic change, forcing or persuading weak developing countries to enact their uniform blueprints. But the present analysis, based on field research in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru, shows that these claims are not convincing. The IFIs cannot impose external models of social sector reform on Latin American countries; to a greater or lesser extent, all five countries under investigation—even weak, aid-dependent Bolivia— diverged from IFI recommendations. The diffusion of Chilean-style pension privatization did not result from the spread of new norms and values either; in fact, the IFIs promoted structural social security reform with instrumental, not normative arguments. Instead of vertical imposition, horizontal contagion among developing countries of equal status—especially direct learning from Chilean pension specialists—accounts for the diffusion of social security privatization. Even in the age of globalization, national sovereignty is quite alive and surprisingly well. Resumen ¿Qué da cuenta de la impactante ola de privatización de los sistemas de pensión que se extendió por América Latina durante los 90s? Muchos autores sostienen que las instituciones financieras internacionales (IFI) promovieron exitosamente este cambio drástico, forzando o persuadiendo a débiles países en desarrollo para llevar a la práctica sus diseños uniformes. Pero el presente análisis, basado en trabajo de campo en Bolivia, Brasil, Costa Rica, El Salvador y Perú, muestra que estos argumentos no son convincentes. Las IFIs no pueden imponer modelos externos de reforma del sector social sobre los países latinoamericanos. En mayor o menor medida, todos los países analizados –aún la débil y dependiente de la ayuda externa Bolivia—se apartaron de las recomendaciones de las IFIs. La difusión de la privatización del sistema de pensiones al estilo Chileno tampoco resultó de la difusión de nuevas normas y valores; de hecho, las IFIs promovieron la reforma estructural de los sistemas de pensión con argumentos instrumentales, no con argumentos normativos. Lo que da cuenta de la difusión de la privatización de los sistemas de pensión no es la imposición vertical sino el contagio horizontal entre países en desarrollo de igual status –especialmente el aprendizaje directo de expertos en pensiones chilenos.—Aún en la era de la globalización, la soberanía nacional está viva y sorprendentemente sana.

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• Charivari 2.0: The Striking Resurgence of an Old Contentious Tactic

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-12-16

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  In recent years, an old contentious tactic in which protesters besiege and harass public officials in their private homes has resurged. Discontented sectors of all stripes have employed what is most commonly called charivari or “rough music.” To elucidate this surprising reappearance, this reflection highlights the rise of conflict over cultural and moral values, affective polarization, and the personalization of politics. Moreover, the proliferation of social media has eroded the boundary between the public and private sphere and thus propelled the resurgence of privacy-breaching direct action. This interpretive essay compares the special features of revived charivari with its earlier incarnations in premodern times and in the revolutions of the long nineteenth century, and with the internet harassment of the twenty-first century. By analyzing the reappearance of a contentious tactic with premodern roots, this essay seeks to shed light on broader trends of sociopolitical development in the postmodern age.

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• The Two Logics of Autocratic Rule. By Johannes Gerschewski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 297p. $110.00 cloth.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-09-09

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• Concept Misformation in the Age of Democratic Anxiety: Recent Temptations and Their Downsides

  World Politics · 2024-07-01 · 2 citations

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  abstract: Despite Giovanni Sartori’s famous warning, contemporary academia has seen a new bout of conceptual stretching, as evident in the loose, expansive usage of terms such as coup and fascism . This concept creep reflects the normative progress of recent decades, which has ruled out true fascism and deterred full-scale coups. Because these normative advances have induced remaining nefarious actors to pursue their undemocratic goals through formally democratic procedures, ambiguity has blurred conceptual boundaries. The article posits that when examining this gray area, scholars may be tempted to overuse dramatic terms because concern about new threats to democracy has motivated a turn to public intellectualism and democratic engagement. Moreover, the proliferation of social media has fueled stiff competition for public attention, which may have helped to create a penchant for stark warnings. The author argues that the resulting conceptual stretching undermines the clarity and accuracy required for academic scholarship and that such imprecision can also be counterproductive for scholars’ normative concerns. The overuse of dramatic terms risks distorting problem diagnosis, exacerbating polarization, and thus reinforcing the danger facing contemporary democracy, which arises primarily from the specific challenges that illiberal populism poses.

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• The Paradox of Personalism in Latin American Populism

  2024-04-22 · 1 citations

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  Why do Latin America’s populist presidents complement headstrong personalistic leadership by appointing paragons of impersonal task orientation – rule-bound technocrats or military personnel – to important governmental positions? This chapter highlights that personalism is inherently limited: “Strong ties” to close cronies and friends cannot provide sufficient personnel for running large modern states. Populist leaders who rise as outsiders without organized parties lack pools of reliable cadres for filling these positions. To guarantee governability, they enlist experts or officers for administering important policy areas. By selecting professional, principled, and predictable technocrats or by recruiting military personnel subject to hierarchical orders, populist presidents promote their own personalistic command. Willful leaders therefore collaborate with the impersonal structures and executive organs of technocracy or the military. This striking combination prevails both among rightwing and leftwing populists who emerge as complete outsiders.

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• Why Populist Authoritarians Rarely Turn into Repressive Dictators

  Comparative Politics · 2024-08-03 · 2 citations

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  Why do most authoritarian regimes installed by populist chief executives not become full-scale, repressive dictatorships? As explanation, scholars argue that populist leaders base their rule on charismatic appeal and voluntary mass support; therefore, they do not need harsh coercion, which would undermine their popular legitimacy. While corroborating this argument, I highlight a crucial complementary factor: populist chief executives find it difficult to marshal large-scale political repression. After all, their insistence on personalistic autonomy and unconstrained predominance creates tension with the military institution, the mainstay of organized coercion. Due to this inherent distance, most populist rulers lack the dependable military support to sustain the imposition of harsh autocracy. I substantiate these arguments with relevant cases from contemporary Latin America, especially Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru.

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• Democracy's Resilience to Populism's Threat

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-01-11 · 34 citations

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  The recent global wave of populist governments, which culminated in Donald Trump's victory in 2016, has convinced many observers that populism is a grave threat to democracy. In his new book, Kurt Weyland critiques recent scholarship for focusing too closely on cases where populist leaders have crushed democracy, and instead turns to the many cases where would populist-authoritarians have failed to overthrow democracy. Through a systematic comparative analysis of thirty populist chief executives in Latin America and Europe over the last four decades, Weyland reveals that populist leaders can only destroy democracy under special, restrictive conditions. Left-wing populists suffocate democracy only when benefitting from huge revenue windfalls, whereas right-wing populists must perform the heroic feat of resolving acute, severe crises. Because many populist chief executives do not face these propitious conditions, Weyland proves that despite populism's threat, democracy remains resilient.

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• Hybrid Regimes in Historical Perspective

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-01-23

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  Abstract Hybrid regimes long preceded the post-Cold War era highlighted by Levitsky and Way’s seminal analysis. During the nineteenth century in Europe, socioeconomic modernization and the gradual advance of political liberalism led long-established monarchies to concede suffrage reforms, protections of human and civil rights, and steps toward the parliamentary responsibility of governments. The resulting hybrid regimes, which allowed for learning and habituation among diverse political actors, constituted transitional stages in the “first wave of democratization,” which powerful labor movements and broader societal mobilization brought to a successful conclusion, especially in the continent’s northwest. In Latin America, by contrast, learning and diffusion from the United States and Europe propelled comparatively “early,” developmentally premature steps toward political liberalism. Given limited modernization and weak societal activism, these hybrid regimes were dominated by established elites, which corrupted liberalism’s formal institutions through informal machinations and electoral fraud. Entrenched elitism and endemic instability hindered transitions to democracy.

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Frequent coauthors

• Andrés Malamud

  University of Lisbon

  62 shared

• Nicolás Vairo

  Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

  49 shared

• Carlos Sojo

  Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

  49 shared

• s Pérez-Liñán

  University of Cambridge

  49 shared

• Bernardo Gomes

  Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

  49 shared

• Osamah Al-Rawhani

  Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

  49 shared

• Yeşim Arat

  Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs

  49 shared

• Ricardo Sáenz

  49 shared