Populist movements emerge as responses to crises of representation whereby elites are incapable/refuse to respond to people's grievances (Arditi 2007: 56). Populism may thus be understood as a regular feature of politics, representing a subversive challenge to the status quo, and as a launching point for a reconstruction of a new order when the previous one has lost legitimacy (Laclau 2005: 177). Indeed, populism may be understood as part of a process of social transformation, a protective movement of society in response to the excessive expansion of the free market (Polanyi 1944).

Where the interests of the wealthiest sectors of society are organized into politics, while issues concerning popular classes are organized out, democracy loses legitimacy. Where left/right party-party differences narrow, popular indifference and distrust of parties and institutions grows (Mair 2013). Mistrust in the political system, alongside withdrawal from participation, opens space for a movement of opposition (Schmitter 2019: 152). As parties/politicians become detached from their traditional social bases, while inequality and socioeconomic precarity become entrenched, democracy is viewed by excluded sectors as a facade for the maintenance of elite privilege. Appealing to a sense of personal danger and a shared sense of political exclusion, populists may portray the political class as having failed, and likely to continue to fail, effectively barring citizens from any realistic prospect of a better life (Dunn 2019: 56).

Such a decomposition of legitimacy of the prevailing model of democracy occurred in several Latin American states around the turn of the millennium. Anti-system outsiders emerged where labour-based and centre-left parties were at the forefront of advancing neoliberal policies, a configuration found in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela (Roberts 2015). The adoption of neoliberal policies by centre-left parties caused party systems to converge around variants of market orthodoxy, programmatically de-aligning partisan competition and channelling societal opposition into extra-systemic forms of social and electoral protest, thereby opening vacant political space for outsiders on the left flank of mainstream parties (ibid.)