The Impact of 'Populist Governments' on National Parliaments’ Powers: The Analytical Framework

The goal of this paper is to propose an analytical framework to explore the impact of “populist governments” on national parliamentary powers. The framework presented in this paper will provide guidelines for authors contributing to the analysis of specific country-cases (presented in this panel). In the empirical dimension, the analysis of populist governments’ impact on national parliaments poses numerous challenges. Yet, the major challenge is to translate specific analytical concepts into empirical indicators – and this paper will address that challenge. In particular, the analytical framework elaborates the definition of a populist actor (how do we know that we see a populist actor?). It also distinguishes between different possible compositions of the executive (populists as a major party or as a junior coalition party) and their potential impact on the legislative branch, specifically the kind and number of various channels of influence. Furthermore, the analytical framework elaborates on the major dimensions of national parliaments’ activities such as law-making, representation, scrutiny and communication. The paper also introduces and discusses the explanatory hypotheses of the study. The goal of the comparative framework is to provide analytical tools to compare insights from the largest possible group of EU member states in which populist actors are in the executive, expanding the hitherto regionalist focus on Eastern Europe, which promises to offer more generalizable findings.