Lautaro Cella

My dissertation examines outsiders’ use of anti-establishment and anti-democratic rhetoric in Latin America and voters’ responses to it. While prior research emphasizes that discontent and outsider support emerge when mainstream parties offer similar policies or when incumbents perform poorly, the surprising electoral success of outsiders in Argentina and Chile—despite policy divergence between mainstream coalitions—suggests that other dynamics are at work. Concentrating on these two countries, I shift the emphasis to the cumulative performance of mainstream parties and the rhetorical strategies outsiders deploy. I employ a multi-method empirical approach, integrating fieldwork, survey experiments, text analysis, focus groups, interviews, and case studies.

The first chapter analyzes how repeated governance failures by ideologically distinct mainstream coalitions —what I term convergence in poor performance— fuel protest voting against the political establishment, particularly through outsider support and invalid ballots. The second investigates the types of anti-establishment appeals outsider candidates use, distinguishing between valence-based and ideological anti-establishment appeals, and explores how each mobilizes different segments of the electorate. The third examines denialist rhetoric that minimizes or justifies past human rights abuses and argues that voter responses to such rhetoric—often deployed by far-right outsiders—are shaped by whether a cohesive and widely shared collective memory of authoritarianism rejecting human rights violations has been institutionalized.