The struggle over the meaning of democracy in parliamentary debate: Investigating the impact of right wing populists in power

The question whether the rise of right-wing populism seriously endangers liberal representative democracy is a highly contested issue. In political theory debate right wing populism is viewed as either a manifest danger for or an inevitable side effect of representative democracy. A broad strand of research investigates right wing populists in power who try to reconfigure the institutions of liberal democracy, or to establish an ‘illiberal alternative’ which tends to turn into an authoritarian regime. However, despite the heated debate on populism and democracy, empirical research hardly explores the impact of right-wing populists on national parliaments and their performance. Some studies investigating populists in government suggest that they hardly make a difference when it comes to assess the constitutive functions of parliaments. On the other hand, right-wing populists’ rhetoric is repeatedly criticized for incitement to hatred and harsh verbal attacks of their enemies. These strategies intent to de-legitimize political opponents and democratic deliberation, therefore, they harm democracy as a culture of public debate and compromise in parliament. These findings illustrate the paradoxical assessment that right wing populists in power do not endanger the formal institutions of liberal representative democracy, but they undermine the democratic code of conduct. In our paper, we start with the conceptual dilemma at the basis of this paradox. Although many researchers agree that representative democracy is challenged by right wing populism, they disagree on its dangerous impact. Right wing populism is either considered to cause a collapse of democratic institutions which indicate a turning point to authoritarianism or it is considered hardly more than an unpleasant style of political dispute. Metaphorically speaking, a political regime is either black, i.e. authoritarian, or white, i.e. democratic. The grey zones in-between can be measured at best. In order to bridge this dilemma, we propose a framework to scrutinize the grey zones of democratic decline, which precede the turning point from democracy to authoritarianism. We first turn to Jan-Werner Müller’s characterization of populism as a moralized form of antipluralism and its claim to exclusive representation of the “real people”. In our framework, we propose to focus on symbolic representation and populist representative claims in parliament as the symbolic centre of democracy. Representative claims form an essential part of parliamentary speeches that try to define and shift the meaning of democracy. We build on the findings of our project on the Austrian National Council which proved that a thorough analytical view on struggles over the meaning of democracy can serve as an excellent indicator for the development of democracy. Democratic transformation is an ongoing process which may finally end up in institutional change, but these changes are accompanied by rhetorical manoeuvres in the struggle over the meaning of democracy. The proposed paper will discuss our theoretical framework against the backdrop of selected empirical examples taken from plenary speeches by populists who claim to represent the people, and in doing so set up a grey zone of democratic decline.