Presidential Personality Traits and Regime Change: Ramón Castillo and the Fall of the Argentine Conservative Democracy

LÓPEZ, IGNACIO ALEJANDRO; TACCONE, NICOLÁS

Providence

Workshop; Comparative Politics Workshop; 2021

Brown University

On June 4th, 1943, Argentina´s conservative democracy was interrupted by a military coup, putting an end to the Argentine oligarchic era and "planting the seeds" of Peronism, a populist regime that changed the country´s political trajectory forever. We leverage this historically relevant case to shed light on how Presidents´ personality traits can operate as a key independent variable in producing regime change. To measure the former democratic President´s personality, Ramón Castillo, we use data from an expert survey that captures the "Big Five" psychometric factors: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Partly constrained, but by no means subjugated to structural or institutional factors, we argue that Castillo provoked an otherwise avoidable democratic breakdown. Specifically, the paper claims that the former President´s low extraversion andlimited of openness to experience negatively affected the survival of the regime. We test the argument by conducting a within-case analysis through process-tracing, scrutinizing how Castillo´s personality traits at three key instances in the critical juncture eight months before the coup were crucial to producing the fall of democracy.