In contradistinction to totalitarianism, Claude Lefort theorised a democratic form of society as one primarily characterised by indeterminacy, absence of ground, and by extension openness to the event. In maintaining this form of society, Lefort reserved a key role for human rights. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, I argue that, despite the fact that Lefort never developed a theory of constitutions, an important role can nonetheless be ascribed to them. I hypothesise constitutions to be key in democratic society’s symbolic representation of itself to itself. Second, I then examine what the repercussions are for this idea when Martin Loughlin’s account of constitutionalism is taken into account. Loughlin’s argument suggests that, while constitutions may have been important safeguards against totalitarianism, constitutions today threaten to become total themselves. I conclude by indicating the populist response as a point of convergence between Lefort’s and Loughlin’s analyses.

Political parties vary in their responses to electoral challenges, including the rise of populist competitors. To address these challenges, they sometimes engage with peripheral issues located outside their ideological comfort zones, and at other times they adhere more closely to their core policies. Although these patterns are well-documented, voters' perceptions thereof remain under-examined. This article argues that voters evaluate parties' claims not just based on the direction of their policy engagement – positive or negative – but also based on the commitment behind these actions, distinguishing ideological commitment from strategic manoeuvres. Employing a pre-registered vignette experiment, the article shows that voters differentiate responses to core versus peripheral issues, regardless of their personal agreement with the policies. Populist attitudes further moderate these perceptions, as voters with such views are typically more sceptical of parties' motives, limiting the impact of party behaviour on perceived commitment primarily to non-populist individuals. This highlights the importance of perceived commitment in elections and the constraints parties face in responding to competition.

The ‘inclusion–moderation thesis’ suggests that populist parties will be tamed by government inclusion. However, empirical evidence is mixed. We argue that this may be explained by different strategic contexts. We hypothesize that populist parties that rely on coalition partners will reduce their populist communication when they have credible government prospects. We analyse multiple years of political communication by two radical-right populist parties, the Swiss People's Party (SVP) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Although the two parties are rather similar ideologically, this is a most different systems design (MDSD). While the SVP is a typical governing party that was only in opposition once (2007/2008), the FPÖ is typically in opposition, with recent government experience (2017–2019). This empirical analysis focuses on these crucial periods. We find evidence of moderation before joining government for both parties in our pooled analysis. However, individual analyses suggest that this was much clearer for the SVP.

Populists emerge when distrust of state institutions or dissatisfaction with democracy convince voters that claims about conspiring elites blocking the general will are valid. We propose that these dynamics change when populists are incumbents; once they command institutions, their sustained support becomes contingent upon trust in the new institutional order, and they are held accountable for making people think democracy is working well. Newly collected data on party populism and survey data from Latin America show that support for populist parties in the region is conditioned by satisfaction with democracy as well as the incumbency status of populists. Dissatisfied voters support populist opposition parties, but support for populist incumbents is higher among those satisfied with democracy and its institutions. While democratic deficits and poor governance provide openings for populists, populists are held accountable for institutional outcomes.

How did the new Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) obtain 9% of the vote in the 2020 Romanian general elections? This article explores the fast rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties by examining the support for the AUR at the locality level in Romania during the coronavirus crisis. The AUR's discourse combined populism, nationalism and anti-masking rhetoric. The findings show great variation across the 3,181 localities, from 0% to 50% support for the AUR, and highlight the significant influence of local cultural and political factors, while economic explanations were not confirmed. The vote for the AUR was high in localities with low ethnic diversity and low voter turnout. This research underscores that national-level explanations obscure important dynamics of PRR support that take place at the subnational level. The rise of the AUR is important beyond the Romanian and European contexts and emphasizes the significance of local responses to global crises.

For the Saskatchewan Party (SKP), identifying with the Western populist tradition was essential to both its creation and initial electoral viability, leading many political commentators to regularly refer to the SKP as a right-wing populist party. Yet scholars have been much more reticent to classify the SKP as an authentically Canadian populist party in the style of the Reform Party of Canada. Part of this disconnect is a result of the SKP's uneven and opportunistic use of populism throughout its history. Indeed, this article argues that the SKP's initial commitment to populism was largely performative, embraced to fend off the challenge of a potential provincial Reform Party. Once the utility of the SKP's performative populism threatened its electoral viability, most of the party's symbolic nods to populism were abandoned. Yet, more recently, the SKP has embraced a new form of populism that merges its pro-business support for the region's oil and gas industry with right-wing policies that are often linked to its rural base. This form of populism, defined as extractive populism, demonstrates that the SKP continues to use populist discourse opportunistically when its right-wing base is threatened.

Electoral competition is typically organized around an evolving set of policy issues. Recent Italian politics suggests a revival of two classic dimensions concerning the mode of interaction that defines the very goals of a polity: elitism (whether goals should be defined from the top down or from the bottom up) and pluralism (whether a polity should only accept widely shared common goals or whether multiple, alternative goals may legitimately compete). While these concerns possibly became less relevant in the heydays of the party government model, recent literatures on populism, technocracy, and process preferences reflect renewed interest. We introduce a two-dimensional elitism–pluralism scheme that explicates the spatial arrangement of top-down and bottom-up visions of party government vis-à-vis models of populism and technocracy. To demonstrate the relevance of the two dimensions for party preference, we turn to the case of the 2022 Italian election, which followed a sequence of a populist, a mixed populist-mainstream and a technocratic government. Voter positions from specialized batteries of the Italian National Election Study are contrasted with party positions from an original expert survey. Findings indicate that preferences on elitism and pluralism complement standard dimensions of issue voting. An explorative analysis of comparative data suggests that many countries across Europe have the potential for similar developments. Electoral competition increasingly reflects concerns about its own principles.

In this article, we analyse how anti-globalist conspiracy theories were mobilised online to delegitimise national authorities and policies designed to curb the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada. These conspiracy theories attacked the political authority underpinning public health measures and targeted purportedly ‘liberal’ policies and ‘globalist’ actors. Our case study examines the Freedom Convoy, a series of protests against Covid-19 vaccine mandates that began in Canada but inspired global demonstrations. The Freedom Convoy fostered and relied upon anti-globalist conspiracy theories, including the ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Great Replacement’, both of which posit a global conspiracy to erode national sovereignty and impose a ‘liberal’ international order. We investigate far-right social media commentary from 4chan’s Politically Incorrect imageboard /pol/, Infowars, and Rebel News, showing how conspiratorial claims were marshalled in alt-tech spaces. These narratives were used to delegitimise public health measures to combat Covid-19 and the Liberal Trudeau government by linking them to various ‘globalist’ forces. In exploring three mechanisms of delegitimation – externalisation, personification, and Othering – we argue that far-right movements like the Freedom Convoy, motivated by anti-globalist conspiracism, mobilise the international realm by leveraging the legitimacy gap of international organisations and agendas to undermine the political authority of actors at the national level.

The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Students of comparative law have long argued that undermining judicial independence is electorally costly, and that the norms against interference uphold institutional checks and balances essential to constitutionalism. However, evidence from countries with robust judiciaries suggests that exposing voters to deficiencies in the legal process or the courts’ partisan leanings can reduce perceptions of judicial legitimacy, making such interference on part of would-be authoritarians more likely. The rise of populist politicians poses additional risks: by emphasizing judges’ unelected status and counter-majoritarian tendencies, populists may erode legitimacy, framing judges as part of a “corrupt elite” opposing “the people.” This rhetoric challenges liberal-democratic norms that limit state interference with individual rights. To test whether one observes the effects of partisanship and procedural fairness on voters’ perceptions of the courts outside the US context, and whether populist messages produce comparable effects, a pre-registered survey experiment is conducted in the context of Czechia, a country that, until recently, has had both a populist executive and a strong and independent Constitutional Court. The study presented respondents with vignettes describing an important electoral ruling of the Czech Constitutional Court, embedding messages that highlighted judges’ unelected status, the ruling’s procedural irregularities, or its partisan implications. Contrary to expectations, findings show no significant effects of any message type on perceptions of judicial legitimacy. The results of the study suggest that the marginalization of robust judiciaries in backsliding democracies may be a largely elite-driven institutional process, with uncertain electoral payoffs.