The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy: Supply and Demand-Side Perspectives

Abstract

While not explicitly anti-democratic, populism of both the Left and Right challenges the checks and balances of liberal democracy as producing distortions of the people’s will. Or, as Takis Pappas has put it, populism can be seen as “democratic illiberalism”. This panel investigates the challenges presented by contemporary populism to liberal democracy from a series of original supply and demand perspectives. On the one hand, it examines the differences between radical and non-radical individuals’ attitudes towards liberal democracy and how citizens with populist attitudes conceive of “the people”. On the other, it looks at how populist parties increasingly cooperate transnationally to challenge liberal democracy. The panel comprises papers looking at a range of countries across Europe and beyond, and mixes empirical works with conceptual research.

Title	Details
The Populist Radical Right: the “Outer Mainstream” of Contemporary European Politics	View Paper Details
Democratic quality from a citizen perspective: Mainstream and radical voters’ conceptualisations of a well-functioning democracy	View Paper Details
Cooperating to Challenge Liberal Democracy: Nationalist Populist Transnational Advocacy Networks	View Paper Details
Radical Right Voters and Liberal Democracy: democrats, authoritarians, or somewhere in between?	View Paper Details
Exploring different conceptions of ‘the people’ Evidence from a large-scale survey experiment in the Netherlands	View Paper Details