Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies Against ‘Populists’: What Role for ‘Militant Democracy’ in a Global Age?

Public and academic debates have increasingly aired concerns about populist challenges to democratic states. Liberal democratic states have long used various legal and political measures to deal with extremists. Such measures of ‘democratic defence’ include more-repressive and more-inclusive measures, as well as those geared towards longer-term and shorter-term threats (Loewenstein, 1937; Pedazhur, 2004; Capoccia 2005; Downs 2012). However, existing studies from literatures on ‘militant democracy’ and ‘defending democracy’ tend to focus on responses to ‘extremists’ rather than ‘populists’. While definitions of both of these terms are contested, some scholars distinguish ‘populists’, whose supporters and activists tend to support some form of democratic governance despite illiberal inclinations, from ‘extremists’, who aim to replace liberal democratic institutions wholesale (eg Mudde, 2004; Betz and Jonson, 2004; Minkenberg, 2011; Rydgren 2007). This is a problem because populists are arguably more of a threat to liberal democratic institutions (if at all) than extremists at present. Another problem is that existing studies do not systematically integrate strategies of ‘democracy protection’ of international actors into accounts of democratic responses to populism. This is despite a growing literature on the role of EU and other international institutions on ‘democracy protection’ (eg. Merlingen et al, 2001; Kochenov and Pech, 2016; Sedelmeier, 2017; Startin, 2010 on EU; Hawkins, 2008, Medina 2015, Micus 2015 on Latin America). This paper seeks to address these limits in the existing literature and to focus on effectiveness of responses to populism. It does so by developing a new theoretical framework for examining the effectiveness of democratic defence across multiple territorial levels and generating hypotheses about the conditions under which successful outcomes might be observed. Effectiveness of measures of democratic defence is measured by examining whether the four main objectives of such strategies identified in the literature have been achieved. These objectives are reducing the ability of populist parties to affect policy outputs; inducing ideological moderation; undermining organizational resources and internal coherence of populist parties; and undermining the normative legitimacy of populist claims. The paper illustrates theoretical points using examples from responses to European populist parties, including the French National Rally (formerly National Front), Alternative for Germany, Danish People’s Party, Fidesz in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland.