Populism and Parliaments: Examining Patterns of Deparliamentarisation

The rise of populism and its impact on democracy have attracted considerable academic attention. Most studies focus on how populists dismantle liberal democratic institutions, such as constitutional courts which, as guardians of the constitution and fundamental rights, are typically their first targets. The majority of these studies show that populists do not only overtly dismantle these institutions, but also undermine them through informal practices and incremental changes that appear innocuous individually, yet in combination produce a damaging effect (Scheppele 2013). In contrast, the question of how populists weaken and disempower parliaments has received comparatively little attention even though the streamlining of legislatures as the embodiment of pluralism can also be considered a “populist classic” (Sajó 2021: 188). While recent case studies have addressed this gap by providing in-depth knowledge about individual cases (e.g. Maatsch and Miklin 2021; Sadurski 2022), we lack systematic comparative research on the patterns through which populists erode parliamentary power. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining how populists in power alter parliamentary rules to weaken parliaments. We begin by theorizing the relationship between populism and parliaments and by developing an analytical framework. Drawing on the literatures on populism (Mudde 2004, Rooduijn 2014, Müller 2016, Urbinati 2019) and parliamentary functions (Sieberer 2011, Sieberer et al. 2016, Marschall 2018), we first differentiate between the deliberative, elective, legislative and oversight functions of parliaments, along with their associated parliamentary rules and practices. Next, we discuss how populist thinking clashes with these functions, developing expectations about how populists undermine them. Studying populists’ incremental approach, that often relies on informal rule changes, comes with methodological challenges, as this necessitates in-depth tracing of the various institutional changes used to weaken parliaments, as well as analysis of the interactions and cumulative effects of these changes. This, however, comes at the expense of analytical breadth. To overcome this challenge and to systematically explore the patterns of populist deparliamentarisation, we therefore conduct a qualitative meta-analysis. Based on clearly defined criteria, we create a corpus of existing qualitative studies and systematize their findings along the four dimensions of our theoretical framework. This enables us to provide a comprehensive picture of the patterns of deparliamentarisation under populist rule and to determine which dimensions of parliamentarism are most at threat.