Liberal Democracy in an Age of Populism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the last decades, Radical Right Populist Parties (RRPPs) have persistently gained strength and achieved electoral successes in many countries. The electoral success of RRPPs has motivated many commentators to argue that democracy faces a legitimacy crisis in the wake of decreasing political trust, increased polarization, and failing public commitment to liberal democracy. The traditional interpretation of the relationship between the growth of RRPPs and political trust has been that many citizens have become discontent with the functioning of democracy and thus cast their votes on RRPPs as a “protest” against the established parties and the democratic system in general. Nevertheless, in many countries where RRPPs have gained substantial electoral success (e.g. Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden), aggregate levels of satisfaction with democracy and political trust have actually increased during the last decades. This somewhat paradoxical development warrants further research on the relationship between the growth of RRPPs and different aspects of democratic legitimacy. It also means that it is important to bridge the gap between the study of radical right populist parties – which has tended to focus heavily on the concept of populism and explanations of RRPP support – and comparative politics in general, and the field of political support in particular.

The main aim of this panel is to collect novel empirical research that investigates consequences of the electoral success of RRPPs for representative and liberal democracy. The panel consists of papers from senior and junior scholars. The individual papers investigate important consequences of the growth of radical right populism, such as political trust, the increasing demand for referendums as a decision-making process, and assessments of affective polarization in European democracies. All papers employ a comparative perspective, drawing on different types of data (cross-country surveys, panel survey data, survey experiments, and country-level data) and a wide variety of methods.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 36: Elections and Voting Behavior

Individual Presentations

• Are Radical-Right Populist Parties Only Bad for Some Democracies? - Marlene Mauk, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

• Exposure to the Other Side(s): Affective Polarization in Multi-Party Systems - Lars Erik Berntzen, University of Bergen

• Affective Polarization & Populism: A Pilot Study in the Netherlands - Eelco Harteveld, University of Amsterdam

• Populists and Perceptions of Referendums as a Political Decision Making Process - Jonas Linde, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen; Andrej Kokkonen, University of Gothenburg; Stefan Dahlberg, Goteborg University; Sveinung Arnesen, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen

Chair

• Jonas Linde Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen

Discussant

• Pippa Norris Harvard University and University of Sydney