Threat or Corrective? Assessing the Impact of Populist Parties in Government on the Qualities of Democracy: A 19-Country Comparison

Abstract

Scholars have long debated whether populism harms or improves the quality of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on the impact of populist parties in government. In particular, it inquires: (1) whether populists in government are more likely than non-populists to negatively affect the quality of democracies; (2) whether the role of populists in government matters; and (3) which type of populism is expected to negatively affect the quality of liberal-democratic regimes. The results find strong evidence that the role of populists in government affects several qualities of democracy. While robust, the findings related to (2) are less clear-cut than those pertaining to (1). Finally, regardless of their role in government, different types of populism have different impacts on the qualities of democracy. The results show that exclusionary populist parties in government tend to have more of a negative impact than other forms of populism.

Threat or corrective to democracy? The relationship between populism and different models of democracy

“…At the same time, populist governments do not live up to their promise of substantially improving and rejuvenating egalitarian and participatory aspects of democracy. On the contrary, the assumed negative association between populism and both the electoral and liberal models of democracy holds across and within the two regions under study, in line with previous findings (e.g., Juon & Bochsler, 2020;Vittori, 2021). Our results indicate that the erosive potential of populist rule holds even when controlling for extreme left or right ideology.…”

“…Hence, we do expect populists in power to value elections as a viable tool to make the will of the people known and to legitimize their leaders. However, people‐centrism also builds on the idea of the homogeneity of the people, which clashes with several of the preconditions of polyarchy, such as the freedom of expression, the freedom of association or media pluralism (see Juon & Bochsler, 2020; Kenny, 2019; Vittori, 2021). Moreover, due to their inclination towards vilifying opponents and portraying themselves as the only legitimate interpreter of the will of the people, populists may also justify hollowing out electoral procedures and skewing the playing field, thereby threatening one of the core ideas of electoral democracy, that is, the fairness of elections (Hawkins, 2010; Levitsky & Loxton, 2010).…”

The Three Faces of Populism in Power: Polity, Policies and Politics

“…Furthermore, specific hypotheses regarding the broader influencing or moderating factors illustrated above are elaborated in the various contributions (within an overall vein of theory refinement). For example, in his article Vittori (2022) stresses the role played by not only the duration of populism in power, as suggested by the extant literature, but also the numbers of years out of government, in the influence of populist parties once in power. Similarly, Askim et al (2022) argue that the exceptionality of the Norwegian case is linked to the fact that populists in this context belong to a party (Norway's Progress Party) with a long history of parliamentary representation.…”

“…Starting with the polity dimension, using the Global State of Democracy (GSoD) dataset and relying on time-series analysis, Vittori (2022) assesses the impact of populism in government on the qualities of democracies. He conducts a comparison of 19 countries (from both Western and Eastern Europe) over three decades, trying to understand whether populist governments are more likely than non-populist ones to reduce the quality of democracy negatively.…”

“…In the contributions of this special issue a multidimensional conceptualization is applied to all three domains of the potential impact of populism in power and the assessment is made in both a quantitative and qualitative fashion. For example, Davide Vittori (2022), in his quantitative comparison of 19 countries in Europe, assesses the impact of populism in power on the quality of democracies, conceptualizing the impact according to 98 indicators of quality of democracy and three possible paths of outcomes, not necessarily mutually exclusive (as a threat, as a corrective, as a threat and a corrective). István Grajczjár et al (2022) build 'typologies of solidarity', where the direction of attitudes towards solidarity and inclusion/ exclusion are combined with the intensity of the impact of populism in power on them across time, in the relatively long-lasting perspective which characterized the Hungarian case of populist ruling.…”