Chapter two details existing explanations for the surprising resilience of charismatic movements rooted in the logic of routinization and presents my alternative theory of personalistic revival. First, I discuss the logic of routinization and illustrate why this theory fails to account for the persistence of Peronism and Chavismo. Specifically, I argue that routinization overstates the ephemerality of citizens’ emotional ties to the charismatic founder and minimizes the immense difficulty of transforming the founder’s authority into a depersonalized party organization. Next, I present my theory of charismatic movement revival, in which I argue that followers’ charismatic bonds can turn into a resilient, affective identity that outlives the founder. Under sporadically occurring conditions, namely the eruption of a crisis, new leaders who portray themselves as heirs of the founder have the potential to reactivate the followers’ charismatic identity, garner support, and restore the movement to political predominance. Thus, charismatic movements can survive during periods of poor leadership and reemerge in personalistic form under more favorable circumstances. This pattern generates a cycle of political volatility that perpetuates personalistic leadership and undermines party system institutionalization.

Chapter one introduces the puzzle of charismatic movement survival and proposes the explanation I advance in this book. First, I summarize the conventional wisdom, which suggests that charismatic movements must transform into institutionalized parties. Next, I present my alternative theory – that these movements can survive by sustaining, rather than discarding, their personalistic core – and argue that this new explanation better accounts for the spasmodic, stubbornly personalistic trajectories of Peronism and Chavismo. Subsequently, I introduce the multi-method research design this book uses to analyze the persistence and revival of charismatic movements in Argentina and Venezuela, which incorporates public opinion data, focus groups, and survey experiments with movement followers; interviews with leaders and political analysts; and archival research documenting each movement’s history. I then clarify and discuss the relationship between three concepts central to this book: charisma, populism, and charismatic movement. Finally, I justify my selection of the two cases of Peronism and Chavismo and lay out the organization of the book.