Reactive or Proactive? Populist Transnational Cooperation and Democratic Backsliding in the EU

The rise of populist parties at both the national and the EU level has caused growing concern over their potential impact on democratic quality and the future of European integration. Studies to date have tended to analyse the transnational cooperation of populists and the EU’s responses to democratic backsliding in member states separately. However, we know little about how the two phenomena interact, although political actors at the centre of both processes often overlap. Do populist actors from different member states collaborate only to block sanctions against backsliders? Or do they also push for a broader common agenda geared towards transforming the EU? We study patterns of co-authorship of parliamentary questions and their contents, as well as roll-call vote coalitions in the European Parliament to examine whether mutual support goes beyond reactive responses to EU intervention to indicate a more proactive cooperation between like-minded actors seeking to shape outcomes at the European level. Concretely, we investigate whether and how populists use recurrent crises around rule of law violations and democratic backsliding not only to denounce the undemocratic character of EU intervention but also to further advance and legitimise an alternative vision of European integration and to strengthen cooperation between the diverse sets of actors contesting the EU. Whereas previous scholarship has indicated a more limited policy impact of populist actors at the EU level, we suggest that their transformative impact on EU politics may manifest itself more over polity-related issues. Bringing together two bodies of literature that typically remain divorced, our novel theoretical approach promises to feed into to broader debates around the nature and future of European integration in times of democratic backsliding.