Governmental activism in the Argentine media realm : populist strategy to construct political

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Governmental activism in the

Argentine media realm:

Populist strategy to construct political

agency

Master thesis Conflict Resolution & Governance Date: 27-06-14 Author: Tobias de Graaf Student number: 6156967 Total words: 30712

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The Clarín newspaper President Fernández de Kirchner holds, reads “The equity of [the city] Moreno grew 91,5% in one year”, while the Clarín newspapers in the background have headlines like “Gigantic protests against the government”, “The government appeals to the Court and continues to attack Justice”, “Kirchner already has the law of media control” and “They claim that the freedom of expression is in great danger”.

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“Many times [President Fernández de Kirchner] uses the Casa Rosada itself to broadcast, and many times she speaks from the Salon of Mujeres Argentinas, the Argentine Women, which is a salon that she made. And there's this little maquette of the building with [two images of] Evita on it in Buenos Aires. […] Whenever she announces good news, you see smiling Evita behind her, and she announces family support, more money for schools, a new hospital... always good news, happy news. But when she needs to make some tough decisions, or starts insulting people, the building is always turned the other way and it's the shouting Evita”

– Peter Scheffer on Fernández de Kirchner’s national broadcasts

(Interview Scheffer, 2014: 19:00)

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Governmental activism in the

Argentine media realm:

Populist strategy to construct political agency

This thesis sets out to answer the question how President Fernández de Kirchner constructs political agency in the Argentine media realm. Since Fernández de Kirchner took office in 2007, the confrontations between government and media have considerably increased. She is generally characterized as a populist, which has been argued to constitute a strategy that actively confronts the large media and furthermore utilizes media like television and radio to directly reach the masses. Therefore, the broader aim of the thesis is to theoretically connect Kirchner’s populist strategy to her governmental activism in the media realm. To this end, the concept of populist political agency is proposed: the strategic aim and active efforts of a populist to create populist structures of support amongst mass constituencies in a manner that a) contrasts regular party institutionalization and b) highlights his/her charisma. It presupposes a virtuous cycle of populist leaders’ presidential power being used to enlarge their legitimacy, thereby constructing political agency. The concept thus provides a way to approach Fernández de Kirchner’s efforts in the media. More specifically, a two-‐part case study on Argentina inquires into Kirchner’s construction of political agency through the institutionalization of power in the media realm as well as the performance of power through the media. I find that the former is achieved by strategically rewarding and punishing media outlets with a variety of instruments that ultimately stimulate self-‐ censorship amongst the media; the latter concerns the performance of an elaborate discourse that unites the Argentine people in Kirchner’s support base, the core elements of which are an emphasis on unity, democratic diversity and Kirchner’s indispensable leadership.

Introduction

On September 13, 2012, a protest against Argentine President Christina Fernández de Kirchner and her government took place in the biggest Argentine cities. Two months later, on November 8, there were even bigger protests: estimations are that around half a million people marched

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on the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities, while people also protested at Argentine embassies and consulates in other countries. (Al Jazeera, 2012; Goni & Watts, 2012). In general, many of the middle class were fed up with Kirchner’s ‘strong-‐arm’ politics, illustrated by the popular chant ‘We are not afraid’ amongst the protesters (Ibidem). The protests targeted Kirchner’s government as a whole, with people raising attention for a wide variety of issues like corruption, high inflation rates, restrictions on buying U.S. dollars, high crime rates and the possible extension of presidential term limits (Al Jazeera, 2012). But in particular one issue stood out in these protests: the new controversial anti-‐monopoly media law.

Supporters of Kirchner defend this law as ensuring press freedom and diversity of information (Garton, 2012A) and the UN Special Reporter on freedom of expression even called it an example for the entire continent (Woerden, 2012). However, critics claim that the law constitutes “underhanded measures to censor [the government’s] critics in the media” (Garton, 2012A) with the purpose to dismantle powerful media groups like Clarín and La Nación (Al Jazeera, 2012; Garton, 2012B). Symbolizing this broadly shared concern are the names of the protests: they were referred to as ‘13S’ (September 13) and ‘8N’ (November 8), because the government’s campaign for the media law had been called ‘7D’, after the day (December 7) that the new media law would go into effect.

The law constitutes the newest confrontation in an ongoing conflict between Fernández de Kirchner’s administration and the Clarín media group: both the government and Clarín accuse each other of attempts to control the media landscape (Garton, 2012A, 2012B). While the media group Clarín owns the best-‐selling newspaper, the most popular TV and cable channel and “a whole array of other TV channels, local newspapers and radio stations” (Martin, 2011), they claim that Kirchner has ‘colonized’ and indirectly controls 80% of the media landscape (Gilbert, 2013; Website Clarín A). Either way, while such ambiguity and controversy continues to characterize the implementation of the new media law, “the rise in news media-‐ government conflict and oppositional polarization” (Kitzberger, 2009: 2) has been striking since the election of Fernández de Kirchner as president in 2007.

Interestingly, it seems that this conflict between Kirchner and the media is also fought out with more subtle tactics: government expenditures in public advertising have for instance increased by 87% in the first quarter of 2012 in comparison to the year before and are allegedly used to fund pro-‐Kirchner outlets (Crettaz, 2012; Website CPJ). Official media also appear to be employed in attempts to control information streams for political benefit: with regard to the 8N protests, for instance, the public television channel barely reported on them

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and categorically understated the number of protestors, talking about 100.000 rather than 500.000 or more (Al Jazeera, 2012).

In addition, Kirchner has used her constitutional right to broadcast a Cadena Nacional [National Broadcast] on all television and radio stations more often almost every year (Pecoraro, 2009; Website Clarín B), thereby bypassing traditional media outlets to reach the Argentine people directly. According to the new media law, a Cadena Nacional may be arranged in ‘serious and exceptional situations’ (Website InfoLEG Argentina). As these criteria are kept vague, President Kirchner regularly uses her right for a Cadena Nacional more than fifteen times a year (Website Clarín B). In the first five months of 2014, she has already broadcasted twelve Cadenas Nacionales on, amongst others, public events, new bills, governmental policy and the introduction a new pesos bill. This stands in stark contrast to her late husband Néstor Kirchner, who only used it twice throughout his entire four-‐year term from 2003 until 2007.

Previous work has characterized President Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina as a left-‐wing populist (Etchemendy & Garay, 2013: 284, 303; Kaufman, 2013: 94; Levitsky & Roberts, 2013: 13-‐14; Roberts, 2013; Weyland, 2013). Weyland for example compares Kirchner’s leadership style to that of other renowned left-‐wing populist presidents – like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and the leaders of Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua (2014: 21) – and argues that Kirchner caused the ‘populist pressures’ on Argentine democracy to increase (2013). Such populist pressures are often related to pressures on the media: populists would actively confront influential media outlets and employ policies of governmental activism in the media realm (Kitzberger, 2009, 2012; Waisbord, 2003). Furthermore, the politicization of the media and subsequent conflict have been argued to be caused by the rise of left-‐wing populism in Latin America, not the least in Kirchner’s Argentina (Kitzberger, 2012: 135-‐136). In addition to being related to the increase in media conflict, populists are argued to benefit from the rise of media platforms like radio and television. As Kirchner’s use of the Cadena Nacional exemplifies, these media can provide ways to maintain frequent and direct contact with the masses and to employ frames (Weyland, 2001). All in all, left-‐wing populists are argued to actively seek the confrontation with the media.

According to O’Donnell, these Latin American populist leaders enjoy eminent political agency to shape society – for instance the media realm – without too much constraint: their countries have ‘delegative democracy’ systems, in which a great amount of political power is delegated to the president who does what he/she deems best. Therefore “most political, social,

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and economic agents can disclaim responsibility” (1994: 67). Furthermore, a president can use this power to create, destroy and alter societal structures in a very personalized search for stability (Ibidem).

Altogether, the 16S and 8N protests characterize a complex conflict between political authority and the media in Argentina. Herein, Kirchner’s populist leadership plays a central role: she engages with and confronts the media in several ways and, as O’Donnell has argued, actually employs power to (re)shape the media realm in a personalized search for stability. Motivated by the question how Kirchner attempts to do this, in this thesis I aim to provide a rich and grounded understanding of Kirchner’s populist efforts in the media. All in all, this leads to the following research question:

“How does President Fernández de Kirchner construct political agency in the Argentine media realm?”

In order to be able to answer this question, the thesis turns to populism for its theoretical framework. The field of – especially Latin American – populism studies provides an elaborate context for why Kirchner engages with the media to construct political agency and thereby allows me to theoretically approach the ways in which she would do so. This theoretical assessment results in the proposition and introduction of the concept of populist political agency, which explains how populist leaders are able to construct political agency. It presents two different innovative strategic angles in which this is presumably done – the institutionalization of power and the performance of power – that shine a new light on populism in practice. These strategic angles will subsequently guide the case study on Argentina.

Furthermore, this new concept fills a gap in knowledge on how populist leaders have been able to govern with electoral success: it has been assumed that populist executive leadership tends to be a transitional period and cannot be combined with electoral success (Canovan, 1999: 12; Weyland, 2001: 14). But theory and practice do not add up here: in the last fifteen years populists like Kirchner in Argentina – but also Chávez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador – have been reelected. There is little academic knowledge and clarity on this subject, though the question is a very pressing and apparent one. Populist political agency however proposes that populist leaders maintain power by strategically creating structures of support in society, which continuously construct political agency and thereby add to and stabilize a populist president’s support. Nevertheless, in this thesis the

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concept of populist political agency is only used to research populist strategy in the media realm. Still, thereby the thesis will evaluate the concept’s theoretical usefulness for further studies on populism in general as well as on conflict between left-‐wing populist leaders and media, which can be found throughout the whole of Latin-‐America. Arguably, this is also important because, increasingly, media conflicts “deeply affect the future shape and role of the media in Latin American democratic politics in unpredictable ways” (Kitzberger, 2012: 136) and, in the same vein, the populist left has been argued to be “more dangerous for the quality of democracy than the neoliberal populist of the right” in Latin America (Weyland, 2014: 21-‐ 22).

First, I will explore and subsequently address my broader theoretical expectations: that Latin American populists maintain power as president by constructing political agency in varying ways and that the media realm is subject to these efforts. Second, a theoretical framework will be constructed in order to analyze exactly why and how political agency is constructed in the media realm by a left-‐wing populist such as Kirchner, using the concept of populism as starting point. Third, following the proposition of populist political agency, the concept is operationalized with regard to the media realm. This divides the case study in two parts: 1) research into how political agency is constructed through the institutionalization of power in the media realm in the conflict between the Kirchner administration and the Argentine media groups (most notably Clarín); 2) research into how political agency is constructed through the performance of power through the media in Kirchner’s Cadena Nacional broadcasts. Fourth, the methods for data collection are detailed: expert interviews and participant observation are utilized. Finally, the two-‐part case study on Argentina will show the multiplicity in which Argentina’s current president Fernández de Kirchner uses her presidential power in and through the media realm to construct political agency. The case study will provide a rich and detailed understanding for the media conflict in Argentina, inform us about what populist presidents are able to accomplish in the media realm in general and evaluate the theoretical usefulness of the concept of populist political agency.

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Theory: Rethinking populism

This chapter offers a context to answer the question why populists would construct political agency. Thereby, it allows me to more specifically theorize and explore how this done. First, populism is argued to be a mobilization strategy based on theories of Weyland (2001) and Roberts (2007). Second, the thesis turns to what this definition means for Latin American populists in power, which enables the thesis to answer why populist presidents such as Kirchner construct political agency. Third, Giddens’s approach to political agency, combined with a practical assessment of the definition of populism, presents a view that comprehends how populists construct political agency. Altogether, this brings me to propose and define the concept of populist political agency, which embodies an overarching understanding to both the questions why and how populists construct political agency. Consequently, the two presented strategic angles in which populists can construct political agency are further detailed by an exploration of the legitimacy-‐power mechanism behind them. With the offered understanding, the next chapter can then operationalize these angles of populist political agency in the context of a populist’s relation with the media, which allows me to research Kirchner’s construction of political agency in the Argentine media realm.

Although populist political agency is meant to constitute a universally applicable concept, it should be noted that its theoretical value is based on studies to Latin American populism. As such, the thesis’s theoretical conclusions and empirical findings must not be compared to European populism too easily.

Defining Latin American populism

If we are to understand how Latin American populists construct political agency, it first needs to be established what it is that populism means and how it differentiates the politicians that are characterized by this term.

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Latin
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history (Roberts, 2007: 3). It is inescapably linked to historical period of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) era, in which interventionist states extended “material benefits to organized working and lower class constituencies” (Ibidem). In many cases this system operated through strong personalistic leadership and the political tactics of union leaders, which ultimately impeded stable party building and consequently a more thorough consolidation of democracy (McGuire, 1997; González, 1999: 214-‐215). Such a political

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environment again favours personalistic leadership: without much democratic checks and balances, a charismatic leader can more successfully address the masses directly and claim that it is his personal mission to fight for their cause. Thereby, these shakily organized but comprehensive political movements – lead by populists – have ensured their survival.

Going back to the notion of extending material benefits to mass constituencies, these populist movements are often characterized by scholars as entailing a form of political

clientelism: “the distribution of recourses (or promise of) by political office holders or political

candidates in exchange for political support, primarily – although not exclusively – in the form of the vote” (Gay, 1990: 648). Take for instance Argentina’s Peronism, which is a broad social and political movement (and according to some an ideology) that “has been in and out of state power for the last 50 years, has been a major political actor in Argentina, and has generated resilient socio-‐political identities amongst popular groups” (Auyero, 2000: 58). This approach to Peronism unites the movement with the concept of political clientelism, as it reproduces “domination and inequality [and guarantees] a somewhat stable number of hard-‐core voters” (Auyero, 2000: 74) and thereby also stimulates the frail political environment in which populism flourishes.

So if Peronism and other political clientelist party projects are historically linked to the Latin American populist tradition (Auyero, 2000, 2001; de la Torre, 1992; Roberts, 1995), how should modern populism be approached? Despite the fact that it does – in the case of left-‐ wing populism –often entail gaining support of lower classes by extending material benefits to them, the ways in which this is reached vary greatly. Latin American populism survived the demise of the ISI era and “coexisted with — or even implemented — neoliberal structural adjustment policies” (Roberts, 2007: 4). During and after the 1980s, strikingly different examples of populist leadership have been identified in Latin America, from the neoliberal variants of Menem to more statist leftist ones of Chávez. Therefore, populism should not be understood as a primarily economic phenomenon. Roberts offers a useful example of the different economic policies that have been proposed by Peronist populist leaders: when Néstor Kirchner “outmanoeuvred his rivals to consolidate a high degree of personal control over Peronism’s vast but fractious party machine” he pulled the party back towards its nationalist and statist roots after the failed neoliberal experiment by “Kirchner’s Peronist predecessor Carlos Menem in the 1990s” (2007: 12).

In summary: by placing populism in such a comparative historical perspective as Robert’s account above (2007), one can more adequately explore its meaning. Although an economic-‐

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focused definition is tempting at first glance, it does not cover the historical manifestations of populist leadership in Latin America: economic policies have been the result of very different experiences, which would then all qualify as populism (Weyland, 2001: 11). Rather, this thesis turns towards a political definition of populism, as a “specific way of competing for and exercising political power” (Weyland, 2001: 11). In this political competition, socio-‐economic measures and policies make up instruments rather than the core of populists. As such, populism constitutes a more universal definition that can be used throughout history on for instance the “classical populist Perón, neopopulist Alan García, conservative José Sarney, and Marxist Salvador Allende” (Weyland, 2001: 11; Sachs, 1989: 17-‐23).

More specifically, the thesis utilizes Roberts’s definition of populism as “the top-‐down political mobilization of mass constituencies by personalistic leaders who challenge elite groups on behalf of an ill-‐defined pueblo, or ‘the people’“ (2007: 5). This definition is in line with Weyland’s view of populism, which focuses on “the basic goal of populist leaders, to win and exercise power, while using economic and social policy as an instrument for this purpose” (2001: 11). Both scholars thus approach a minimal definition of populism with a focus on the intent and goals of populists themselves, namely the mobilization of the masses.

Altogether, populism constitutes a mobilization strategy. Still, Roberts does incorporate the two classical characteristics that are ascribed to populists in almost every political definition, whether considered a political communication style (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), an ideology (Mudde, 2004; Rooduijn & Pauwels, 2011) or as a specific set of ideas (Hawkins et al., 2012). These characteristics are that populists a) target the masses by spreading an anti-‐establishment sentiment and b) appeal to the ‘virtuous’ and true people of a country (Roberts, 2007: 5). Populists should thus be seen as politicians who employ wide varieties of strategies and instruments to gain the support of mass constituencies. Now let us turn to what this means for populists in power like Kirchner.

Populists in power

With the ‘anti-‐establishment’ characterization of populist strategy, Robert’s definition already hints at the shared academic assumption on populists in power: that they cannot govern as they make up the establishment that they normally criticize. Weyland has for instance argued that populist executive leadership tends to be a transitory period, because it “either fails or, if successful, transcends itself” in a democratic system (2001: 14). He further claims that, in recent history, at least three Latin American presidents were removed from office due to this reason (2001: 16). Canovan further details why populists would fail by explaining that they

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cannot live up to their broad promises when chosen as chief executive (1999: 12). This view coincides with the general contention that populists and authoritarian rulers gain support in settings of institutional frailty by making promises without much cost to anyone, while, once in power, government policies will hit many parts of the country’s population (O’Donnell, 1994: 66).

Nevertheless, in the last decade, several populist leaders have governed with electoral success: Chávez (Venezuela), Morales (Bolivia), Correa (Ecuador) and Kirchner (Argentina) have all been re-‐elected. This poses an issue in the academic field on populism. But when populism is defined as a mobilization strategy, as it is here, it actually does not seem so strange that a populist in power manages to maintain power. After all, the winning and exercising of power are put central as the main goal of populists (Weyland, 2001: 11). It suggests that populists can utilize certain instruments to maintain power – like for instance extending material benefits to the poor – that counter the likelihood of a “shift from wide popularity to general vilification [that] can be as rapid as it is dramatic” (O’Donnell, 1994: 66). In short: most scholars in the field on Latin American populism never accounted for other instruments – besides socio-‐ economic measures – that, in theory, prevent such rapid ‘vilification’. Thus, it seems likely that successfully governing populists have employed other instruments with which they maintain support and power. More recently, Weyland hinted at the practices of Chávez, which further supports this view: he has provided a sort of successful populist script to govern with electoral success, which regards strategic measures like reinvigorating the constitution, special tax audits to critics and, indeed, ceaselessly opposing critical media outlets (2013).

All in all, I propose that, instead of failing or transcending their populist characteristics, these presidents aim to create and have created populist structures of support in society: structural factors that strengthen the bond of the populist and his/her constituency in order to maintain a high and stable level of support. This view presents an understanding for the question why populists would construct political agency: when they are in power, they need to rely on structural factors instead of broad promises to maintain their support. In the following paragraph, I address how this view relates to the broader academic discussion on structure and agency. Afterwards, I set out to also answer the question how populists construct political agency. The answers to both the questions why and how populists construct political agency, is ultimately incorporated in the proposition of the concept of populist political agency.

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Structure/agency – the construction of political agency

The argument that populist presidents utilize certain populist structures of support logically brings up the question: are they indeed able to do so? This question inquires into the larger academic debate in the social sciences about the importance of agency and/or structure in society. I follow Giddens’s philosophical academic perspective, which presupposes a complex dynamic between the two: structure and agency are constantly influencing each other. He defines political agency as “the stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-‐in-‐the-‐world” (1976: 75). Within the field of politics, agency then represents deliberate actions that intervene in political and social structures. Structures are understood as practices that are built up from “rules and resources, recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems” (1984: 377). These rules are “generalizable procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social life" (1984: 21), whereas resources form the sources of power that are activated by rules and guide social interaction. A good metaphor that is often used to put this into context is that of language: there are certain rules to language that people use to communicate; however, there is also room for interpretation and language keeps changing (e.g. new rules are formed) due to the lively social practices of interaction, which are the resources of language.

This two-‐sided interpretation has been coined the ‘duality of structure’ by Giddens: agents are guided by this social interaction in their actions, but at the same time structure results from these social practices, be it by the employment of political agency or the consequences of past actions. Therefore, as Giddens states: “structure is both medium and outcome of reproduction of practices” (1979: 5).

Let us now adjust Giddens’s approach to this thesis’s subject: politicians aim to shape society by governing and implementing policies that are translated into laws. In this perspective, democratic politics lets the few exercise agency in name of the many, thereby placing a significant amount of agency at the top of the societal hierarchy. As was argued by O’Donnell, Latin American presidents even wield more political agency, which is delegated to them in a setting of institutional weakness and which they often use in a personalized search for stability (1994). They are thereby better enabled to establish structures: they can create certain structures that form rules for the societal practices.

In summary: a Latin American president is presumed able to destroy, alter or create societal structures with deliberate actions that intervene in society. In other words: with political agency. The twist of this thesis of course being that populist actively strategize to use their power to create more space for their own political agency, by altering the societal

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system that gives them power. The notion of populist strategy in exerting agency also fits with Giddens’s argument that an agent is self-‐aware of the potential of his actions as well as of the context that sets limits for these actions. Think of (left-‐wing as well as neoliberal) populist presidents Fujimori from Peru, Chávez from Venezuela, Uribe from Colombia and also Fernández de Kirchner from Argentina, who all aimed to formally extend their term limits, successful or not.

Considering all the above, I aim to have clarified that active populist strategies have the potential to construct political agency by creating and/or altering populist structures of support. These structures presuppose the employment of strategic instruments with which a populist stabilizes his/her support; this thesis specifically focuses on the strategic efforts of Kirchner to utilize populist structures of support in the media.

Defining populist political agency

It has thus far been argued that populism should be understood as a mobilization strategy and that Latin American populists strategize to construct political agency by placing populist structures of support in society. A second step is to look what these populist structures of support look like, in order to provide an understanding that also answers the question how populists construct political agency.

Weyland argues that a focus on uninstitutionalized mass support is useful to explore populism in a practical way (Weyland, 2001: 16). This thesis has claimed that populist presidents aim to prevent a rapid fall in popularity with populist structures of support. The assumption behind this was that they initially have a strong but easily breakable bond with their electorate, based on broad promises they had made as candidates. With help of Weyland, the thesis now offers an in-‐depth look at this assumption:

Populists’ “lack of firm organized support” (Ibidem) makes them politically vulnerable. Therefore, to compensate for “the fragility of their mass support, populist leaders seek to create a particularly intense connection to their followers” (Weyland, 2001: 13). Indeed, they tend to rely on a direct and fluid relationship with the masses, which is intensified with a personal appeal of charisma (Ibidem). Weyland describes a populist’s charisma as “a supernatural capacity to represent and lead the people, rescue them from adversity and usher in progress” (Weyland, 2001: 13-‐14). This is also what Roberts refers to with the use of the word ‘personalistic’ in his definition of populism. Virtually every successful populist (elections-‐ wise) is synonymous with the concept of charismatic rule: it signifies his/her capacity to truly

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speak to the hearts of people, convince them and win them for his/her cause, whatever that may be.

It follows that this central feature of populism plays an important role in a populist’s structures of support: in some way he/she maintains the support from the masses by employing charisma. Weyland for instance stresses the importance of the spread of television for populists, as it allows them to reach the masses directly and create a personal relationship with them (2001: 16). So a populist’s charismatic appeal forms the basis for the bond with the masses and the stronger this bond is, the less it matters for his/her support if economic issues come up or if promises are not kept. After all, his/her followers will be convinced that it is not the populist’s fault. With the populist’s ability to speak to the hearts, people’s ability to judge objectively is blurred and hearts are actually won. All in all, populists seem to construct political agency through populist structures of support that assess their charisma.

Furthermore, we can recognize another way in which populist structures of support help a populist chief executive maintain support. The establishment of the direct and fluid relationship with the masses implies that other more indirect forms of a bond between a populist and his/her electorate are shunned (Weyland, 2001: 16). Indeed, Weyland also concludes modern media “further diminished populists’ interest in organized intermediation” (2001: 16); something political parties normally pursue. Low levels of institutionalization leave room for a populist to shape and dominate his/her organization. But party organization is not avoided altogether. Rather, “to stabilize their rule many populist leaders eventually seek to ‘routinize their charisma’ and solidify their mass following by introducing elements of party organization or clientelism” (Weyland, 2001: 14). The difference being that these populist organizations – such as the highly disciplined party machine from Haya de la Torre (Peru) or the government supported grass-‐roots Bolivarian Circles (Venezuela) – offer almost no ways to influence policy on higher levels. Rather, their main function is to cultivate populists’ support and ‘stabilize their rule’, as Weyland coined it well (Ibidem). Furthermore, Roberts adds that these populist organizations also serve to counteract elite threats and “crowd out new or competing populist projects” (2007: 7-‐8).

Everything considered, these political institutions thus form populist structures of support: they represent structural factors that maintain a stable level of support. So a second way in which populists construct political agency is through manners of institutionalization

that contrast regular party institutionalization. Together with the earlier mentioned way of

constructing political agency – through structures that assess a populist’s charisma –, the established view also answers the question how populists construct political agency.

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Now I am able to propose and define the concept of populist political agency: the strategic aim and active efforts of a populist to create populist structures of support amongst mass constituencies in a manner that a) contrasts regular party institutionalization and b) highlights his/her charisma. Populist political agency thus symbolizes a sort of virtuous circle: a populist uses political agency to construct more political agency. Theoretically, this concept enriches the field of populism studies by comprehending both why and how populists construct political agency and thereby are able to maintain power without abandoning their populist ways. Below, I further explore the theoretical mechanism behind the two manners in which populists construct agency, after which these can be operationalized in the next chapter so that they can guide the thesis’s case study to Kirchner’s populist political agency in the media realm.

The legitimacy-‐power mechanism of the two strategic angles

Populist political agency is thus taken with exerting political agency to construct political agency, which again creates space for the enactment of presidential actions and decisions that intervene in societal structures. This cycle can also be understood in terms of power and legitimacy: power is exerted to construct legitimacy, which provides the populist with more stable support and therefore with more potential for the exertion of power. After all, since populists in opposition have been argued to have the main goal to mobilize support (becoming legitimate as a leader), populists in power seemingly have the goal to maintain their support and position (staying legitimate as a leader). This mechanism of populist political agency thus concerns a cycle, which – with effective populist structures of support – is potentially ever continuing: Chávez for instance reigned as the Venezuelan president until his death, just after his reelection for the fourth time in a row. Such maintaining of power asks for the construction of enough political agency, which thus can be understood as having the aim to enlarge a populist’s legitimacy as a leader.

Weber’s view of the sorts of legitimate rule provides a way to distinguish between the kinds of legitimacies that can be enlarged by populist political agency (1978). He analyzes three ideal types of legitimate rule as having three different reasons for legitimacy at their core:

1. Traditional legitimate rule, as derived from “an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them” (Weber, 1978: 215). This would concern a person that is chosen to lead people out of

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tradition or belief, or gets such a position due to its heritage, for instance a king, the pope or a priest;

2. Legal-‐rational legitimate rule, as derived from the “belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands” (Ibidem). This would concern a person that is appointed to lead people through commonly accepted rules like an association’s statutes or the constitution, for instance a teacher, a member of congress or for that matter the chairman of a bank;

3. Charismatic legitimate rule, as derived from the “devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him” (Ibidem). This would concern a person that has enacted or shown exceptional qualities and virtues like prudence, courage or modesty.

As stated by Weber, this distinction serves to enable systematic analysis, while these ideal types are usually not found in their ‘pure’ form (1978: 216). Rather, legitimate rule rests on a mix of these sorts of legitimacy and not only on one or the other. Nevertheless, the thesis discards the kind of legitimacy that comes from traditional sources; in Latin America today there are no leaders with political/executive power who got their power from such religious or monarchic traditions: politicians are democratically chosen as presidents, as executive leaders. Religion and sanctity nowadays only play a role in the church, of which the Latin-‐American top might have informal networking power due to its role of facilitator of mobilization of rural and indigenous communities (Trejo, 2009). But this kind of legitimacy thus cannot be attributed to democratically chosen political leaders. That leaves two ideal types of sources of legitimacy that are applicable to Latin American democracies: legal-‐rational and charismatic. In the current Latin American democracies, these two are logically intertwined. The president derives its power of making political decisions from the fact that he/she occupies the position of president as the constitution prescribes it in a society of law. Let us characterize this as a short-‐

term kind of legitimacy for a chief executive’s political agency, due to its immediate reference

to the backbone of a constitutional democracy. The charismatic legitimacy then is a more long-‐

term kind of legitimacy: politicians and particularly populists use their charisma over time to

build up character and gain support, to ultimately be elected and stay elected as president, which consequently results in legal-‐rational legitimacy as well. Vice versa, with legal-‐rational legitimacy, the president also occupies a position in which he or she can potentially gain in

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charismatic legitimacy due to the publicity and power that come with the position. Each form of legitimacy thus creates potential for the politician to increase the other.

Now let us focus on the conceptual sorts of power with which these two kinds of legitimacies can be enlarged. Combining the twofold approach to the power-‐legitimacy mechanism with the definition of populist political agency below, leads me to connect the two strategic angles with which populist political agency is constructed to these kinds of legitimacy and thereby further detail them.

Firstly, legal-‐rational legitimacy corresponds well to Dahl’s classical view of the use of power, that states that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (1957: 203). This behavioral view of power is concerned with the manifest, visible and observable use of power: legal-‐rational legitimacy can come forth out of manifest actions that change the rules/laws of society. Everything considered, the thesis proposes that populists actively institutionalize power to maximize their legal-‐rational legitimacy: the way society works is altered by using formal tools such as laws but also by informal tools such as exerting pressure on other actors. A constitutional change that allows the president to serve an extra term falls under this category for instance, as well as silencing critics by for instance prohibiting certain associations or burdening them with additional taxes. To summarize, these kinds of populist structures of support are used to get a grip on political life (influencing what is legal) as well as civic life (influencing the discussion).

Secondly, this thesis argues that charismatic legitimacy can also be forthcoming out of an exertion of power. However, this constitutes a rather unorthodox and new view of power that draws on and combines elements of the views of Lukes (1957), Bachrach and Baratz (1962), Goffman (2003) and Hajer (2009): a populist can perform power through agenda-‐ setting and framing, which has to potential to enlarge a populist’s charismatic legitimacy. Let me illustrate this with a remark of ‘The New Yorker’ reporter Anderson, who noticed that Hugo Chávez performs government live on television (Anderson 2008; Kitzberger, 2009: 9): on television Chávez was portrayed as the listening leader who helped Venezuela where and when it was necessary, with which he spoke to his charismatic legitimacy. Charisma in this sense thus has everything to do with creating a frame about the populist’s virtuous leadership. All in all, the notion of performing power is relatively new and not yet understood in its complexity – especially with regard to populist tendencies –, but Hajer has done groundbreaking research on the performance of authoritative governance. However, Hajer states that authority should not be confused with power (Hajer, 2009: 20; Friedrich, 1958), as

Governmental activism in the Argentine media realm : populist strategy to construct political

Governmental activism in the

Argentine media realm:

Populist strategy to construct political

agency

Table of contents

Governmental activism in the

Argentine media realm:

Populist strategy to construct political agency

Introduction

Theory: Rethinking populism