Abstract

There is a burgeoning literature on how to deal with populism in advanced liberal democracies, which puts a strong emphasis on legalist and pluralist methods. There is also a new and expanding literature that looks at the consequences of coups d’état for democracies by employing large-N data sets. These two recent literatures, however, do not speak to one another, based on the underlying assumption that coups against populists were a distinctly twentieth-century Latin American phenomenon. Yet the cases of Venezuela in 2002, Thailand in 2006 and Turkey in 2016 show that anti-populist coups have also occurred in the twenty-first century. Focussing on these cases, the article enquires about the extent to which military coups succeed against populists. The main finding is that although anti-populist coups may initially take over the government, populism survives in the long run. Thus, anti-populist coups fail in their own terms and they do not succeed in eradicating populism. In fact, in the aftermath of a coup, populism gains further legitimacy against what it calls repressive elites, while possibilities for democratisation are further eroded. This is because populists tap into existing socio-cultural divides and politically mobilise the hitherto underrepresented sectors in their societies that endure military interventions.

摘要

关于如何处理先进的自由民主国家中的民粹主义的新兴文献，特别强调了法制和多元主义方法。也有新的和不断扩展的文献，它通过使用大量N数据集来探讨政变对民主国家的后果。然而，这两项最新文献并未相互对话，其基础假设是针对民粹主义者的政变是二十世纪的拉丁美洲现象。然而，2002年的委内瑞拉，2006年的泰国和2016年的土耳其的案例表明，在二十一世纪也发生了反民粹政变。着眼于这些案件，文章询问军事政变在多大程度上成功打击了民粹主义者。主要发现是，尽管反民粹政变最初可能接管政府，从长远来看，民粹主义得以生存。因此，反民粹政变就其自身而言是失败的，并且它们在消除民粹主义方面没有成功。实际上，在政变之后，民粹主义获得了对其所谓的压制精英的进一步合法性，同时民主化的可能性进一步受到侵蚀。这是因为民粹主义者利用了现有的社会文化鸿沟，并在政治上动员了其本来可以忍受军事干预的社会中代表性不足的部门。