The Populist Party Model: Organizational Change and the Quality of Democracy

Today, the rising tide of populism is transforming political parties. It has propelled the breakthrough of new parties on both sides of the political spectrum—from the Freedom Party (Austria) and the National Front (France) to Podemos (Spain) and the MoVimento 5 Stelle (Italy)—and is transforming old mainstream parties from within—as in the case of the US Republican Party under Donald Trump or UK Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Existing research tends to define populist parties in ideological terms or discusses populism more broadly as a rhetorical style. However, given how populism is now present in both Left and Right, mainstream and niche parties, there is a need to rethink what makes a party populist. In this paper, we argue that all of these parties, albeit to different degrees, share the adoption of a new organizational form, the “Populist Party Model”, in which electoral leaders develop direct ties with their own networks of supporters. Consequently, in these organizations power has shifted away from conventional party elites (national executive committees and representatives in parliament), towards individual candidates and social movements at arms-length from the party’s control. This paper introduces a larger research project that seeks to explain the emergence and diffusion of the Populist Party Model, as well as examine its effects on the quality of democracy. It begins with a review of the literature on party organization from the perspective of changes in the intra-organizational distribution of power. It then presents the Populist Party Model as a new organizational form that has been increasingly adopted by mainstream and niche parties in advanced and developing democracies. These organizational changes have been accompanied by new strategies to raise financial resources (e.g., through crowd-funding and donor prospecting), to communicate with the electorate (e.g., through digital consultations and micro-targeting propaganda), and to mobilize popular support (e.g., through platforms for online activism and databanks with voters’ personal information), all of which reinforce the direct relationship between electoral leaders and their supporters. We then present illustrative case studies that show how this organizational form is today present in democracies in both Europe and the Americas, and in parties from all sides of the political spectrum. Finally, we conclude with a discussion about the challenges that these organizational changes pose to the quality of democracy.