The Rise of Illiberal Democrats? Populist Parties and the Politicisation of Democratic Principles

In this paper, we ask how populist parties make elements of the democratic system to the subject of political debates. With the rise of populist parties around the world, a debate about the current state of democracy and the potential threat of democratic backsliding has emerged among scholars, public commentators and politicians. While populists often present themselves as agents of true democratic governance, their claim to represent the general will of a homogenous citizenry is at odds with elements of liberal democracy that constrain the political power of the majority and protect minorities and individual liberties. Mudde uses the term ‘illiberal democrats’ to describe this ambivalent relationship of populism with democracy. However, the politicization of democratic principles in party discourses has generally received little attention in empirical studies. With this paper, we want to shift the perspective on the relationship between populism and democracy from a conceptual debate to an empirical question. Specifically, we explore which elements of democracy populist parties promote and which elements they attack. We look at nine crucial functions of democracy (Merkel et al.) and measure populists’ positions toward these elements. In our analysis, we compare the discourse between traditional channels of communication and the discourse on social media. Methodologically, our paper is built on a quantitative text analysis of social media accounts and press releases of populist parties in Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Switzerland. We rely on a cross-lingual dictionary-based approach to identify the different democratic principles in each parties’ discourse and measure their salience. Based on this selection of texts, we use a structural topic model to explore how parties frame democratic principles on social media and in their official communications. While we find commonalities among populist parties, we also emphasize country-specific differences in populist discourse. Additionally, our results reveal important differences between left and right populists, in line with previous studies that highlight the different effect of left and right populists on democratic quality. Overall, our results contribute to the ongoing debate on the effect of populism on democracy. As populists gain access to power across Europe, they are able to shape political systems according to an illiberal vision of democracy. Here, our paper provides a differentiated way to assess the relation between populists and democracy empirically. Finally, our analysis of the differences between of social media and press releases also has consequences for research on the attitudinal consequences of exposure to populist messages, given differences in the audience of both platforms.