The text by Makulilo serves as an overview of possible types of populism at the examples of three (former) populist leaders in Africa (Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa). All of them used populist strategies to gain or contain their power. However, populism may easily turn into authoritarianism when leaders use force to resist change. A problem demonstrated in this article is that populist regimes often tend to create shallow democracies, because of which they often resolves in a legitimacy crises, especially if they promise changes that they could never achieve. Apart from that, they often claim to be anti-political, anti-institutions and anti-elites, but in the end use these exact institutions for their benefit.
The text by Griffin provides a comparison of totalitarian and authoritarian mass dictatorships and shows how each respectively responds to modernity. While totalitarian mass dictatorships usually strive for a change of the people towards a ‘new man’ and a ‘new order’, often with utopian ideals, authoritarian mass dictatorships usually tend to perform power over the masses, often resulting in people following their lead out of fear, instead of conviction.