Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat
Prof Kurt Weyland delivers the UCL Institute of the Americas/Journal of Latin American Studies Annual Lecture
Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat
11 Jun 2026, 17:00 – 19:00
This talk will examine how democracies have coped with the biggest threat that has arisen in the 21st century, namely populism: Democratically elected charismatic leaders can, potentially, destroy democracy from the inside by abusing government power, dismantling liberal checks and balances, establishing political hegemony, and perpetuating themselves in office. With Donald Trump’s election in the US in 2016 and his reelection in 2024, fears about this threat have reached a fever pitch. Fortunately, however, empirical research suggests that democracy commands considerable resilience. Populist leaders face substantial obstacles in their efforts to suffocate liberal pluralism: They can do so only under restrictive conditions that have firm objective foundations and cannot be engineered. For these reasons, democracy often survives, even in the institutionally weaker systems of Latin America and Eastern Europe. By inference, democracy’s strength in North America and Western Europe is even higher. As a result, US democracy is very likely to withstand the severe stress test to which President Trump’s energetic push for increased power is currently submitting it.
This event is sponsored by Cambridge University Press
Professor Weyland's research interests focus on democratization and authoritarian rule, on social policy and policy diffusion, and on populism in Latin America and Europe. He has drawn on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including insights from cognitive psychology, and has done extensive field research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela. After receiving a Staatsexamen from Johannes-Gutenberg Universitat Mainz in 1984, a M.A. from UT in 1986, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991, he taught for ten years at Vanderbilt University and joined UT in 2001. He has received research support from the SSRC and NEH and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in 1999/2000 and at the Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, in 2004/05. From 2001 to 2004, he served as Associate Editor of the Latin American Research Review.
He is the author of Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela (Princeton University Press, 2002), Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion: Social Sector Reform in Latin America (Princeton University Press, 2007), Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848 (Cambridge, 2014), Revolution and Reaction: The Diffusion of Authoritarianism in Latin America (Cambridge, 2019), Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism during the Interwar Years (Cambridge, 2021), several book chapters, and many articles in journals such as World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Democracy, Foreign Affairs, and Political Research Quarterly. He has also (co-)edited three volumes, namely Learning from Foreign Models in Latin American Policy Reform (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004) and, together with Wendy Hunter and Raul Madrid, Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and When Democracy Trumps Populism: European and Latin American Lessons for the United States (Cambridge, 2019). His latest book, Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.