Populism in national parliaments. New perspectives

Abstract

In recent years, populism research experiences enormous attention. Scholars study the concept of populism, how it can be assessed and measured, and its effects across different aspects of democratic politics. The increasing presence of populist parties in national coalition governments also stimulated discussions about the potential effects of governmental participation on the discourse, the ideology and the organization of populist parties. In these debates, however, a focus on populist actors in the national parliamentary arena is mainly overlooked, even though the study of populists’ parliamentary behaviour, broadly understood, provides new possibilities and perspectives to address relevant issues in populism research. Parliamentary behaviour enables scholars to analyse the organizational structure of party behaviour, individual MPs contribution and interaction as well as rhetorical strategies. Analysing populist actors – both MPs and party groups – within the parliamentary arena provides new insights into how these actors go about their daily political agenda, how they perform their representative function, how they interact with and influence other political parties, whether they intensify or tone down their populist rhetoric after taking part in institutionalized practices of deliberation and compromise. Lastly, a focus on parliaments provides new methodological venues for the study of populism, for example allowing researchers to use parliamentary debates as textual data going beyond more conventional sources like press releases, party manifestos or leaders’ speeches. Further, it enables scholars to analyse populism in a comparative setting across countries and over time. Embracing emerging research interest, parliamentary behaviour provides a rich data source to study populism. Thus, analysing populism within the parliamentary arena offers a privileged standpoint to study how populist actors change while in power, and how they take part and influence policy-making, providing a richer understanding of how populism affects political outcomes and society as a whole. The panel invites theoretical and empirical contributions from all related academic fields relating to the following questions: How do populist parties change their rhetoric and ideological profile in parliaments? How populist parties influence policy-making and parliamentary workings? How populist parties perform their representative function? Which social groups do they represent? How is “populism” employed as a rhetorical construct by political elites?

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