In both popular and academic parlance, the term “populism” has taken on a more or less uniformly negative connotation. It implies being an enemy of democracy, anti-immigrant and, most obviously, irrationally under the sway of a charismatic leader. Yet in Latin America, populism has been an integral element of the development and democratization process and plays an important role in the contemporary process of social transformation under the left-of-centre governments that have emerged since the turn of the century. Thus, we need to deconstruct the term “populism” and explore its diverse historical manifestations, to rethink its meaning and its prospects moving forward.

This introduction to a volume consisting of detailed case studies of Latin American populism, or populism in Latin America, advances in several moments. First, I will approach the burgeoning international debate on rethinking populism to distil some broad lines of investigation, that might serve to guide our research. I distinguish between a structural/ocioeconomic frame for understanding populism, another where the focus is on populism as political strategy/style and, finally, one where populism is seen within an ideational or discursive frame. I also introduce the complex, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between populism and development, democracy and social transformation. A second section introduces several Latin American perspectives on populism in a broad conceptual sense. It examines the structural functionalist approach of the 1950s, the dependent development “compromise state” interpretation of the 1970s and, finally, the discourse approach and its critiques that dominated in the 1990s. We then move from the abstract to the concrete, with two stylized accounts of the classical populism of the 1930– 70 period and the contemporary populism that has emerged in the 1990s and, particularly, in the context of the progressive governments post-2000. This account is set in a broadly political economy frame, with a focus on the changing patterns of capital accumulation, the role of the state and the waves of popular mobilization that have characterized Latin America since 1930.