From Militant Democracy to Normal Politics? How European democracies respond to populist parties

In this paper, I examine whether existing classificatory frameworks and typologies for classifying responses to anti-system parties are helpful for understanding responses to contemporary populist parties in Europe. I identify several problems that make it difficult to apply these directly to the study of responses to contemporary populism. I then present the core criteria for a new approach to classifying initiatives opposing populist parties (IoPPs). Firstly, the approach classifies IoPPs according to the type of political actor that initiates a response against populist parties (public authorities, political parties and civil society actors). The second classificatory criterion is whether the modes of engagement employed by these different types of actors are ‘tolerant’ or ‘intolerant’. In the final part of the paper, I present the six IoPP types with illustrative examples. The six IoPP types are rights-restricting, ostracism, coercive confrontation, 'ordinary' legal controls and pedagogy, forbearance and adversarialism. The paper concludes with reflections on methodological issues for classifying inititaives opposing populists according to the typology and the hypothesis that European states tend to use the tools and practices of 'normal politics' rather than exclusionary tools of miitant democracy to respond to populist parties.