When democracy enters into crisis, the accusing finger usually points to populism. Charismatic leaders, anti-institutional rhetoric, and authoritarian styles dominate headlines and debates, reinforcing a comfortable narrative: liberal democracy is threatened from below. However, this explanation is incomplete—and, often, misleading. In Latin America, and increasingly in other regions as well, the most persistent problem is not populism, but oligarchy.
Since the independences of the nineteenth century, Latin America has been a vast laboratory of republicanism. The new republics that emerged from the colonial rupture embraced principles that were radical for their time: popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, competitive elections, and secularism. They were not imperfect copies of Europe, but original experiences that sought to articulate political freedom in profoundly unequal societies. The problem is that this inequality was never resolved. Citizenship was proclaimed universal but practiced selectively, shaped by hierarchies of class, ethnicity, and gender.
From this historical imbalance arose republics that were formally representative but substantively oligarchic. Over time, small economic elites—often linked to external interests—managed to capture the state, shape institutions, and turn political representation into a mechanism for reproducing power. Elections continued to exist, but political equality was hollowed out. These were not failed democracies, but something more unsettling: democracies compatible with the domination of a few.
Viewing democracy through the republican tradition makes it possible to better understand this dynamic. A republic is not reduced to the act of voting. It entails the effective protection of freedom against domination, whether exercised by the state or by private powers. For this, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and a public administration capable of acting autonomously from particular interests are indispensable. When wealth and power are extremely concentrated, these conditions erode. Inequality turns many citizens into dependents, vulnerable and, ultimately, less free.
This perspective also helps to reinterpret populism. Far from being an inexplicable anomaly, populism often emerges as a response to the everyday experience of exclusion and abuse produced by oligarchic regimes. When institutions cease to represent, when justice systematically protects the powerful, and when economic growth benefits only a few, the appeal to “the people” against “the elite” becomes politically effective. The problem is that populism rarely resolves what it denounces. By concentrating power, weakening checks and balances, and politicizing the state apparatus, it ends up replacing the domination of the minority with personalist domination, without rebuilding the republic.
For this reason, the deepest threat is not only democratic backsliding understood as electoral manipulation or restrictions on the press, but what could be called a republican backsliding. This is manifested in the erosion of the state as an impersonal institution, in the blurring of the line between the public and the private, in the degradation of the bureaucracy, and in the discretionary use of power. Normalized states of exception, attacks on oversight bodies, or the dismantling of administrative capacities in the name of efficiency do not strengthen democracy: they empty it from within.
Faced with this panorama, Latin American history also offers normative and political resources. Alongside oligarchic and populist traditions, there exists a current of plebeian republicanism: Indigenous, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and radically egalitarian. Social movements, popular uprisings, and constituent processes have sought, time and again, to expand real citizenship and to subject economic power to the public interest. It is not a matter of rejecting institutions, but of democratizing them; not of personalizing power, but of distributing it.
This discussion does not concern Latin America alone. In Europe and other regions, democratic liberalism has shown a dangerous complacency toward inequality and technocratization. The sacralization of private property, blind faith in merit, and the delegation of political decisions to markets and experts have weakened the sense of the common good. Citizenship has become passive, and politics managerial. In this context, it is not surprising that disenchantment grows or that authoritarian solutions flourish.
Recovering concepts such as republic, oligarchy, and revolution is not a nostalgic academic exercise. It is a way of naming real problems that the dominant language has concealed. Democracy cannot be sustained without a state capable of protecting rights against private power, nor without a citizenry that is materially equal in its capacity to influence public affairs. If the debate is limited to condemning populism without interrogating the oligarchic structures that feed it, the diagnosis will remain wrong.
Democracy, understood in its full sense, is a democratized republic: an order of self-government grounded in civic equality, legality, and effective participation. Defending it today requires more than protecting electoral procedures. It requires confronting the concentration of power and wealth that, silently, corrodes it. Because if democracy is in crisis, it is not only because of those who challenge it from outside, but also because of those who hollow it out from within.
Text based on the special issue of LASA Forum “Oligarchic Republics in Latin America” (vol. 56, no. 4, 2025), available here:https://forum.lasaweb.org/issues/vol56-issue4/
Autor
President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and professor of comparative politics at the University of British Columbia in Canada. His latest books are: Challenges to Democracy in the Andes (Lynne Reinner) and Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom (Oxford University Press).
Professor of Political Sociology at UNED, Madrid. His latest books: The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements (Oxford University Press) and Social Movements and Democracy (National Electoral Institute of Mexico).
