(with Veronica Hurtado, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez)
Do individuals care about democracy? Does a shared understanding of democracy matter for democratic resilience?
This project examines the divergent views in public opinion polls around Castillo’s attempted coup in Peru.
The project focused on studying how Peruvian Citizens, in particular in the Highlands, perceived former President Castillo’s 2022 self-coup attempt. Our initial findings suggest that citizens’ interpretations of undemocratic behaviour are deeply shaped by historical memory and lived experience. Many respondents did not regard Castillo’s attempted coup as undemocratic—not because they were misinformed, but because they understood it through their own experiences of political exclusion and state violence. In these narratives, Castillo was often perceived as entrapped by authoritarian elites. At the same time, the subsequent repression of protests was seen as a continuation of the state’s long-standing practices of criminalising and stigmatising rural and Indigenous populations.
Viviana Baraybar-Hidalgo 