Through the analysis of historiographical and theoretical bibliography, principally from sociology and political science, this paper analyzes the relationship of national-popular movements, understood as a specific type of populism, with public policies. The concept of national-popular movements is used to typify the nationalist anti-oligarchy movements that appeared in Latin America in the second third of the twentieth century and to analyze their main characteristics, focusing on their democratizing as well as anti-liberal nature. For this purpose, the paper proposes the use of a minimum ideational definition of populism and a cumulative definition for national-popular movements. It argues that, although it is impossible to associate populism with a specific type of public policy, this is possible in the case of national-popular movements, which promoted democratizing public policies, aimed at social integration, whilst maintaining an anti-liberal bias.