A question of the underlying social contract? About the differentiated impact of populism on policy-making in proportional and in majoritarian democracies

The impact of populist democratic morals on parliamentary behaviour – and in turn on public policy –can be better understood by putting the spotlight on the different social contracts which are institutionalised in the two main forms of parliamentarism which currently exist. Idealtypically, the Rousseauan version of democracy as self-rule is enshrined in majoritarian democracies. The Lockean version of democracy as a form of more intermediated rule is closer to proportional systems. In majoritarian systems members of parliaments’ role-taking is twisted towards delegation of ideas and interests of citizens in the constituencies, while in in proportional systems members of parliament tend to exercise their mandates as trustees, basing their choice about which social interests to represent on manifold consensus and intermediation processes between political elites and parties. Populism promotes less intermediated froms of policy-making and is thus ideologically closer to the Rousseaun version of democracy. Populist moral pressure pushes members of parliament to act more like citizens’ delegates with important implications for the policy-making process and the stakeholders concerned. Drawing on both the policymaking literature and parliamentary sociology, this paper theorises first how populist moral pressure for less intermediated and less pluralist forms of democracy changes informal rules of policymaking in parliament. It then shows how populist moral pressure exerts a differentiated impact on majoritarian and on proportional democracies. Primary difference is that in proportional democracies populism breaks with informal norms which are constitutive of the democractic legitimacy of the system as a whole. While populism is thus an important challenge for both proportional and majoritarian democracies, the risk of a total breakdown of trust in democractic policy-making is higher for consensual democracies. To understand this difference is crucial for the debate about the erosion and resilience of democracies.