Populism in Chile: The pathways non taken and the incidence of the political culture in the country

Abstract

In Latin America, it is customary to place Chile as an exceptional case where not important populist leaders really existed. The aim of this work is to dig into this exceptionality. First, by inquiring, in a historical level, the existence of eventual populist leaderships like Carlos Ibañez, for then scrutinize the historical roots of why nobody of these Chileans leaders reached a significant legacy in current national politics, unlike what happened for example, with Peronism in Argentina. As a plausible answer it will show an analysis of the critical junctures and explore the “non taken pathways” that produce as result a country without important populist leaderships. The main result of this work is that this situation is explained by the “institutionalist” Chilean political culture, hostile to populism emergence