Acknowledgments
I first encountered Peronism as an undergraduate study abroad student in 2007, during the election that would bring Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to power as Argentina’s first democratically elected woman president. As I observed the presidential campaign, I marveled at the flexibility and resilience of Peronism. The political movement had endured for more than sixty years, despite the exile and subsequent death of its charismatic founder – not to mention several coups, a ruthless military dictatorship, tumultuous economic crises, and dramatic ideological swings. Through it all, Peronism had maintained its place as Argentina’s predominant political force, a fact evidenced in part by Cristina’s decisive electoral victory that year. What, I wondered, was the basis of so many citizens’ ongoing attraction to this remarkably persistent yet notoriously chameleonic movement?
Four years later in 2013, I was attending Raúl Madrid’s graduate seminar on democratic consolidation at the University of Texas at Austin when a fellow student exclaimed in class that Hugo Chávez’s death had just been announced. In the years that followed, Venezuelans suffered a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions – a crisis that worsens today as a political stalemate, international sanctions, rock-bottom oil prices, and, most recently, the novel Coronavirus plague the country. That the devastating consequences of this complex humanitarian emergency have fallen on the shoulders of millions of innocent Venezuelans is an unspeakable tragedy.
While Chavismo emerged in a different temporal, geographical, and cultural context than Peronism, in graduate school I noted the striking resemblances between the two movements. Both were founded by a charismatic leader who vowed to rescue the country from a terrible crisis. Both movements underwent ideological transformations that made them difficult to define along programmatic lines. And perhaps most importantly, both movements attracted the fervent adoration of millions of citizens and dominated politics, not only during the lifetimes of their founders but also in the years after the founders’ deaths. This book seeks to explain the remarkable power and persistence of charismatic movements like Peronism and Chavismo and teases out the consequences of their resilience for democracy.
The multi-year process of planning, researching, writing, and completing this book would not have been possible without the support of many individuals and institutions. I am especially indebted to my dissertation supervisor at the University of Texas at Austin, Kurt Weyland. Kurt’s mentorship, tireless enthusiasm, and extremely generous contributions of time and feedback were instrumental in shaping both this book project and my career as a scholar. From our initial correspondence when I was a prospective graduate student in 2011 to the completion of this book project nine years later, I have benefited enormously from Kurt’s teaching, wisdom, and guidance. I strive to be as dedicated a mentor to my future students.
I am also deeply grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee at UT Austin for their advice, feedback, and encouragement. Bethany Albertson introduced me to political psychology and the experimental method. She encouraged me to think creatively and enrich my project by incorporating original survey experiments. During my first year of graduate school, Raúl Madrid’s course on Democratic Consolidation pushed me to rigorously assess the effects of charismatic leadership on democracy. Over the years, Raúl posed challenging questions and offered thoughtful suggestions that helped me improve my theory and evidence. Daron Shaw shared great wisdom and literature on campaigns and elections, consistently urging me to think about the “big picture” beyond Latin America. Discussions with Javier Auyero, along with his written work, greatly deepened my understanding of Peronism. Javier also introduced me to contacts in Argentina who became some of my most invaluable and rewarding partners in research. Last but not least, my undergraduate advisor, Juan Lindau, helped sow the seeds for this project fourteen years ago, nurtured my intellectual curiosity, and profoundly influenced my decision to pursue an academic career.
During my fifteen combined months of fieldwork in Argentina and Venezuela, many others made generous contributions of knowledge, time, and encouragement without which this book would not have reached its completion. In Argentina, I am especially grateful to Shila Vilker, Carlos Gervasoni, Natalia Arnuado, and Nicolás Papalía for their advice, support, and friendship. I also thank María Matilde Ollier, Sebastián Mazzuca, and Lucas González at Universidad Nacional de San Martín, whose help with my pilot survey experiment in 2013 was instrumental to the success of my full survey experiment three years later. I am grateful to Noam Lupu and Luis Schiumerini for including my survey questions about charisma in the 2015 Argentine Panel Election Study. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella provided an institutional home away from home as well as the opportunity to present my research and receive feedback from some of Argentina’s foremost experts on Peronism. In Venezuela, I thank Thais Maingon, Gerardo González, Alexandra Panzarelli, Fernando Pires, Félix Seijas Rodríguez, José Vicente Carrasquero, Deborah Vega, Ricardo Méndez, Douglas and Sonia Méndez, Elsa Fernández, Jael Palacios, and Ricardo Romero for entertaining my questions, deepening my understanding of Chavismo during hours-long conversations, and helping me navigate the challenges of daily life in Caracas, which were substantial. I thank Benigno Alarcón and the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello for generously offering an institutional affiliation during my fieldwork. In Peru, Carlos Meléndez and Eduardo Dargent provided valuable insights and guidance. I am indebted to hundreds of other scholars, politicians, country experts, and voters in Argentina and Venezuela who generously shared their time and experiences with me in the context of informal conversations, interviews, focus groups, and survey experiments.
I am also grateful for the incisive feedback offered by numerous scholars in the contexts of workshops and conferences. In addition to the scholars mentioned above, my friends and colleagues at UT Austin including Kate Bersch, Jake Dizard, Riitta-Illona Koivumaeki, Calla Hummel, Ken Miller, Katie Putnam, Kim Guiler, Iasmin Goes, Daniel Weitzel, Nathalia Sandoval-Rojas, Tommy Burt, Brendan Apfeld, Matt Rhodes-Purdy, Chieh Kao, Wendy Hunter, Amy Liu, Mike Findley, Xiaobo Lu, Ken Green, Jason Brownlee, Chris Wlezien, Tse-Min Lin, Henry Dietz, and Stephen Jessee provided encouraging and thoughtful comments that helped me improve the central arguments and empirical analyses advanced in this book. Beyond Texas, I am grateful for the feedback and support of Laura Gamboa, Jordan Kyle, Brett Meyer, Dave Ohls, Cathy Schneider, Adam Auerbach, and Gina Lambright, who patiently listened as I presented the book’s central arguments to them. I also benefited tremendously from the excellent comments of several discussants on different sections of this book, including Ken Roberts, Mollie Cohen, and Matthew Layton. Two anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press read the entire book manuscript and provided several pages of invaluable comments and suggestions that greatly improved the book. Finally, my colleagues at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University, including Ludovico Feoli, Moisés Arce, David Smilde, Ann Mische, Francisco Rodríguez, Rachel Schwartz, Stefanie Israel de Souza, David de Micheli, Alexander Slaski, and Sefira Fialkoff, as well as members of the Department of Political Science at Tulane, including Mirya Holman and Ruth Carlitz, offered generous feedback and a stimulating intellectual environment in which to complete my book manuscript as a postdoctoral fellow.
Several institutions provided financial support for my project. The Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin funded summer fieldwork trips to Argentina and Venezuela through the Argentine Studies Program Grant and the Tinker Summer Field Research Grant, respectively. Fulbright and the Institute for International Education provided the nine-month US Student Scholarship with which I conducted the rest of my fieldwork in Argentina. The National Science Foundation generously funded my survey experiment through a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. UT Austin’s Graduate School Continuing Fellowship supported an additional four semesters of my graduate education, including one semester of fieldwork in Venezuela and three semesters of dissertation writing. P.E.O. International funded my final year of graduate school as I completed my dissertation. Finally, the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University provided a Special Projects Grant to fund the indexing of this book.
I would also like to acknowledge the outstanding assistance of Ashely Beene, whose careful comments on the manuscript greatly sharpened my prose. Additionally, I thank Sarah Doskow and Cameron Daddis for expertly guiding me through the publication process of my first book at Cambridge University Press. I also appreciate the permission granted by SAGE Publications to reproduce parts of my articles, “The Revival of Charisma: Experimental Evidence from Argentina and Venezuela,” published in Comparative Political Studies 52:5 (2019): 687–719, and “The Power of Charisma: Investigating the Neglected Citizen-Politician Linkages in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela,” published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America 11:3 (2019): 298–322. I thank the Journal of Comparative Politics at the City University of New York for permission to reproduce part of my article, “The Politics of Succession in Charismatic Movements: Routinization versus Revival in Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru” 52:2 (2020): 289–316.
Finally, I am grateful to my family for their unconditional love and support throughout the process of developing this book. My parents have always welcomed my pursuit of a liberal arts education, applauded my successes, and taught me to learn and grow from my mistakes. They have also followed me around the world, bringing a piece of home to me regardless of how far I have strayed from Colorado. My in-laws have graciously supported my ambitious career, even though it has meant moving their son and family thousands of miles away from their home in Denver. Both sets of parents have doted on our son, Jamie, and have provided invaluable support when his parents have had to work during nights, weekends, and a global pandemic. Last but not least, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my husband, Mark, who has lifted me up, made me laugh during even the most challenging times, and joined me on the wild and exhilarating adventure of parenthood. It is to him and our beautiful son that I dedicate this book.
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