Now the People Rule: The Impact of Populism on Liberal Democracy

Over the past two decades, several quantitative studies have confirmed the claim that populism harms liberal democracy. In particular, populism seems to harm liberal institutions associated with democratic contestation, including civil liberties, the quality of elections, and horizontal accountability, while having a more ambiguous relationship with aspects of democratic participation. However, these studies seldom identify which aspects of populism harm liberal democracy. This lack of causal identification stems from conceptual differences and ambiguous stances on what populism consists of, in particular, whether it consists of a “people vs. elite” rhetoric (the so-called ideational approach), a type of top-down, movement-based organization (the political strategic approach), or a particular set of issue positions associated with the radical right and radical left (approaches defining populism in terms of its host ideology). Indeed, scholars seem unwilling to lay out clear causal mechanisms out of fear of offending different camps. Our study seeks to contribute to this scholarly conversation through a quantitative comparison of the predictions of different definitions of populism. To begin with, we take advantage of the cross-regional data in the expansive Global Populism Database, which provides data on the populist rhetoric of chief executives in over 60 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania; this focus on chief executives is an especially important attribute for gauging the impact of populist rhetoric in government. Next, we test the impact of this rhetoric separately from other factors by incorporating indicators of personalism in party organization, including party age and the presence of charismatic linkages; and the ideological stances of parties in government. Together, this design allows us to test the strength of different aspects (and definitions) of populism. In general, our results confirm the negative impact of populism on liberal democracy. In addition, however, we show that the strength of the populist discourse used by chief executives, and not organizational features, is the better predictor of declines in the quality of elections and civil liberties. The same holds for declines in horizontal accountability, although political-strategic factors moderate this relationship. Finally, all of these effects are explained by populist rhetoric and not the issue positions of these parties; indeed, the negative effects for democracy are found on the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Thus, the results give credence to the ideational approach to populism while still providing some support for the political-strategy approach; approaches defining populism in terms of its host ideology are not supported.