Liberal, Anti-liberal… Illiberal Democracy? How Ruling Parties Transform – Constitutional Changes from Rhetoric to Practice

How do ruling liberal, moderate-rightwing parties transform into national-conservative populist parties thereby causing a regime transition from liberal-democracy to illiberal majoritarian people’s rule? The puzzle haunting party competition is based on Down’s inaugural understanding of electoral competition as relying on the race to the center, to capture the median voter (Down, 1950). Party competition therefore relies on the ideological positioning of the parties and the perpetual ideological attraction of the center. This accounts, historically, for the transition from ideological parties to catch-all parties, and later to the cartel party model (Mair and Katz, 1995). Yet, the rise of nationalist-populism acts in the face of this logic: under the new rules of the game, it is having an extremist, xenophobic, nationalist or racist creed that attracts new cohorts of voters and manifests itself in the populist rise into power, portrayed as a populist zeitgeist (Mudde 2004; Rooduijn et al. 2014; Hameleers and Vliegenthart 2020). How moving to the extreme-right, what seems as an electoral suicide, harnesses government for a growing number of once-upon-a-time moderate rightwing parties? And how might this cause a regime-change, well beyond the ideological transformation of the political system involved? My paper is set within the theory of Populism in Power (Urbinati, 2019) which has three insights to be placed within the context of party competition. One is a perpetual election scene: the leader strives to always be in election as it reaffirms his direct contact with the people and his embodiment as the choice of the people. Among such leaders we find Trump, Putin, Orbán, Modi, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu. Second, the leader presents himself as the leader of the people but the people does not equal all the citizens (demos) but only a majority (ethnos) which perceives itself superior to the rest of the citizens. Third, the style of populist rule is one which forsakes mediating institutions and delegitimizes the judicial system, the free press, the gatekeepers of democracy and the opposition. Crucially, populism in power, being in power, may not just change the discourse but also enhance a change of policy, and even impose a change of the rules of the democratic game. The nexus of changing the public discourse and changing the rules of the democratic game is at the center of my investigation. The paper builds a model of changing public discourse (moving away from liberalism, through conservative-nationalism, to anti-liberalism, and thereby legitimizing illiberal democracy) and transforming the constitutional design in practice based on Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s USA. It then takes Netanyahu’s Israel as a case where national-populism overtakes liberal-nationalism (Talshir, forthcoming), and implements not just policy-change but transformation of the rules of the democratic game. The national-conservative constitutional revolution, which was a programmatic tool to harness voters and rise into power, becomes an agenda through which a regime-change into illiberal democracy is enhanced, severely threatening judicial review and the democratic constitutional design thereby propagating tyranny of the majority. Ideas become political reality and generate a regime-change.