Populism, Democracy and Representation: Populist Parties’ Democracy Agendas in Comparative Perspective

Populist parties are a symptom of the crisis of political representation and one of their key claims is the reform of party democracy, as they favour an unmediated relationship with political institutions. Nonetheless, populist proposals regarding institutional reforms remain an understudied topic. This paper aims to innovate existing research by adopting a fresh approach to the analysis of populist agenda, as its rationale is built on the focal point of three autonomous theoretical axis: populism, political representation and democratic theories. Based on a comparative research design, we analyze party manifestos for populist and non-populist parties in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Our classification considers the institutional typology (i.e. the particular democratic institutions or rules covered by parties’ proposals), populist/ constructive nature, type of representation and model of democracy each proposal advocates, besides accounting for the impact each one has on participation and public contestation. Specifically, we examine the relationship between representative and represented, the main loci for political reforms, the democratic conception they imply and its impact on political rights. Overall, this study may enable new paths of research on the populist vision of political representation, in particular by shedding more light on the debate about the relation between populism and (representative) democracy and by identifying the nucleus of institutional reforms shared by populist parties.