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In spite of recent advances in the literature, there are still fewer empirical works, embracing different regions of the world, that analyze the impact of populist governments on the quality of governance. This paper, which covers 33 countries from five world regions from 1996 until 2019, intends to fill this gap. By using different statistical methods, our data show that periods under populist governments in power had a significantly negative effect on governance quality measured by the WGI data set. For each of the six dimensions of governance, however, (voice and accountability, political stability and the absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption) we detect exceptions. In addition, exploring the data by geographical region and types of populism (exclusive, neoliberal and inclusive), crucially refines our findings, showing a great deal of differences and revealing that similar types of populism operate in different ways in separate geographical contexts. These variations are explained both by the difficulty of defining slippery concepts, and applying them consistently to historical cases, and by particular traits and historical occurrences that significantly affect the relationship we analyze. Through different fixed regression models, finally, we control for a series of potentially confounding factors and find that our major descriptive findings have been confirmed.

The recent strides of democracy in Latin America have been associated to conflicting outcomes. The expectation that democracy would bring about peace and prosperity have been only partly satisfied. While political violence has been by and large eradicated from the sub-continent, poverty and social injustice still prevail and hold sway. Our study argues that democracy matters for inequality through the growing strength of center left and left parties and by making political leaders in general more responsive to the underprivileged. Furthermore, although the pension reforms recently enacted in the region generated overall regressive outcomes on income distribution, democratic countries still benefit from their political past: where democratic tradition was stronger, such outcomes have been milder. Democratic tradition and the specific ideological connotations of the parties in power, on the other hand, did not play an equally crucial role in securing lower levels of political violence: during the last wave of democratizations in Latin America, domestic peace was rather an outcome of political and social concessions to those in distress. In sum, together with other factors and especially economic ones, the reason why recent democratizations have provided domestic peace in most cases, but have been unable so far to solve the problem of poverty and inequality, is that democratic traditions in the subcontinent have been relatively weak and, more specifically, that this weakness has undermined the growth of left and progressive parties, acting as an obstacle to redistribution. Such weakness, on the other hand, has not prevented the drastic reduction of domestic political violence, since what mattered in this case was a combination of symbolic or material concessions and political agreements among powerful élites and counter-élites.