Leaders are turning into ever-more important actors, which explains as much the deterioration of democracy, the rise in its deficit, and the populist and plebiscitary transformation, as it does the republican deepening. This has marked the necessity to deepen the study of the leaderships, a subject little touched on by Latin American political science. With the aim of contributing to the dynamic of these debates, the article analyzes the leadership variable as an explicative in the democratic deterioration and explores its relationship with democratic quality in the framework of national political conditions.