Jesús Guzmán-Castillo

Contact: jesus.guzman(at)mail.udp.cl

Doctoral student, Universidad Diego Portales/ Universidad de Costa Rica

Jesús Guzmán-Castillo holds a B.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in Statistics from the University of Costa Rica, and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. He is a researcher at the Center for Research and Political Studies at the University of Costa Rica. His areas of expertise include citizen participation, political culture, democracy studies, public opinion, electoral studies, and U.S. politics.

He has taught courses on research methodology at the University of Costa Rica and the Universidad Diego Portales, across programs in Political Science, Psychology, and the Master’s in Methods for Social Research.

In 2018, he served as an advisor on open government issues at the Ministry of Communication, specifically focusing on citizen participation and access to public information.

Populist Attitudes and Democratic Ambivalences in Chile and El Salvador: Structures, Profiles, and Explanations

My doctoral research investigates the ambivalent attitudes that individuals exhibit toward supporting democracy, approached from a social psychology perspective. In this framework, support for democracy is conceptualized as an interattitudinal structure, with dimensions that vary in strength, accessibility, and importance for individuals. The study seeks to explore this attitudinal structure across different Latin American contexts and identify the value-based, ideological, and partisan identity factors that influence the activation or suppression of democratic attitudes. Populist attitudes are particularly relevant, as they may influence the activation of democratic or anti-democratic attitudes in specific circumstances, such as during the emergence of populist candidates in electoral settings. To achieve these objectives, surveys will be conducted in El Salvador and Chile—two countries with distinct transitions to democracy and differing outcomes. The surveys will incorporate the eight-item scale developed by Akkerman et al. (2014) to measure populist attitudes, along with additional covariates, to examine how individuals with populist attitudes are more likely to exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward democracy.