Values and crisis of representation in Latin America: can we antecipate a political personalism?

Abstract

The paper revisits the debate on personalism, updating it to the contemporary context of representation crisis in Latin America from the second decade of the 2000s. The central question of research is: what are the possibilities for the development of personalism in Latin America? The theme is justified by bringing to the Latin American context the debate on growing political personalism in countries such as Spain, Italy, Germany, United Kingdon and the United States in the present decade. Using data on cultural culture and political behavior as values of traditionalism x self-expression, adherence to democracy, interpersonal trust, trust in parties and trust in the media and with a theoretical contribution on populism and personalism, we analyze whether there are possibilities for development of personalities in Latin America. The results reinforce previous works that show that the political culture and the political behavior common to the great part of the Latin American peoples tend to the acceptance of political figures of populist character, being the personalism only one of the characteristics components of this one.