Governing in the Name of the People: The Impact of Populist Executives on Legislatures and Legislative Procedures in Italy and Hungary

This paper will analyse the impact on the representative and legislative assemblies of “populist parties” in Italy and in Hungary. These are two special cases of governing populists, indeed. The paper has thus a first descriptive goal, in providing a systematic bulk of empirical evidences on how the presence of populist parties have conditioned and altered the functioning of representative institutions in the two countries, emphasizing both similarities and differences. The focus, in particular, is on law-making, and on the legislative procedures used by the populist executives to secure the passage of their bills through the parliament. The country specific nature of the executives, of the parliamentary organization and of the party systems in the two countries will then let us to explore and test some hypotheses on the differential impact of populists in government.