Podemos and Five Star Movement: Analysing the "Populist Representation Paradox" in Practice.

In recent years, populist parties have increasingly gained access to national representative institutions all over Europe, confirming that populism, as a political phenomenon, is all but episodic. Increasingly, scholars have focused on the effects of populists in power, for instance on the effects caused by their participation into government onto specific policy areas or on government coalitions’ dynamics. Less attention has been devoted to the effects of parliamentary participation on populist parties. Does parliamentary experience affect and change new populist parties, namely those parties that reach the "representation threshold" for the first time, and if so, how? We would expect populist parties to be highly "responsive" once they enter into parliaments, given their tendency to emphasize the closeness to people's demands and their commitment to popular sovereignty. In this paper, I propose a qualitative in-depth comparison of two cases, Podemos and the Five Star Movement. The cases are treated as most different cases, even though they are selected for their newness to parliamentary experience. ). Building on the party mandate model, I assess their responsiveness to voters' priorities during thier first parliamentary mandate, including insights from parliamentary socialization theories. The analysis is based on parlialmentary behavioral data and in-depth interviews with elected representatives