Populism versus representative democracy: A fertile soil for democratic innovations?

Abstract

Contemporary Western representative democracies face many challenges that hamper their functioning. This panel seeks to examine one such challenge that has been said to pose an existential threat to representative democracy, namely populism. Until recently, most populism research has focused on conceptualizing and operationalizing populism, on why people vote for populist parties and what happens once such parties get elected (Rooduijn, 2019). All of this is within the classic realm of representative democracy. Yet it remains to be seen how populists themselves reimagine traditional representative democracy and how reimagining by others, e.g. via democratic innovations, lands with populists. To fill this gap, the panel collects studies addressing how populist parties challenge the fabric of representative democracy and which democracy they themselves prefer by connecting insights from the field of populism to those from the fields of Euroscepticism, political psychology and democratic innovations. Next to populist political actors, populism at the citizen level has drawn increasing attention (Akkerman et al., 2014; Marcos-Marne et al, 2022, Zaslove et al., 2022). Specifically, this panel will include contributions on how populist parties and citizens relate themselves to challengers to representative democracy such as technocatic, direct or deliberative democracy. The panel will host contributions employing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including case studies, but also comparative studies highlighting differences and similarities as well as broader perspectives.

Title	Details
How Populist Parties Talk About Deliberation in Europe	View Paper Details
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Have a little faith in deliberation? Examining the effect of participation in a citizens' assembly on populist attitudes	View Paper Details
Do populists want direct democracy? Examining the link between populist attitudes and the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative"	View Paper Details
Public hearing in the Polish parliament - an antidote to the crisis of representative democracy ?	View Paper Details