Latin American Left-Leaning Populism Index

The Latin American Left-Leaning Populism Index (LALLPI) tracks active left-leaning populism across roughly 22 Latin American countries from 2000 to the present, combining measures of populist rhetoric with the economic and institutional policies typically associated with populist governance. Most existing indices measure rhetoric alone; LALLPI goes further by asking whether that rhetoric actually translates into policy, and whether the resulting policy is itself populist in character — letting researchers distinguish leaders who talk populist without matching action from leaders who quietly govern that way.

The index combines a rhetoric score with two policy sub-indices: Economic Populism, covering trade, monetary, and regulatory policy, and Institutional Populism, covering rule of law, corruption, and constraints on executive power. Full methodology, variable-level documentation, and the underlying open-source data pipeline are available on the project’s dedicated site.