Articulating Populism in Place: A Relational Comparison of Kirchnerism in Argentina

Abstract

How are populist movements articulated in place, and what political tensions can arise when they mobilize across scales? Despite the historical significance of particular places for populist movements (e.g., countryside or city), much populist scholarship remains trapped in a national lens, and geographical analyses are only starting to take seriously place-based articulations. Drawing on Gillian Hart’s Gramscian approach, we understand articulation as a dual process of cojoining and resignifying that unfolds through geographically situated practices and language. We extend this by paying attention to actors of populist mobilization, political parties, and social movements, examining their articulation of political subjectivities and antagonisms through place-based contexts, thus providing an analytical framework for studying populism. Considering the national-popular movement of Kirchnerism, our analysis unfolds through a relational comparison of two contrasting places in Argentina—its wealthy capital city and the impoverished province of Jujuy—moving dialectically across different scales, considering contradictions between local and national mobilizations of Kircherism while also contextualizing these in regional and global process. In so doing, we demonstrate that a geographically sensitive analysis of populist conjunctures provides insights into the success and failures of national popular movements. Specifically, place-based movements face dilemmas between gaining support and autonomy from national counterparts, whereas national popular movements both depend on and are threatened by local populist success.