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Abstract
This conclusion summarizes the findings of the special issue and offers some comparative conclusions about what we can discover by examining the reactions to populists in government in Austria, Ecuador, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Venezuela. Looking across this set of cases, we show that there is a diverse range of reactions to populists in power in terms of the actors involved, the strategies followed and their effectiveness. We start by summarizing the main ideas advanced in the framework for analysis of the special issue. After this, an overall assessment of the effectiveness of the opposition to populists in power is presented and here we offer an overview of each case study. Finally, the article concludes by proposing some comparative points, which not only seek to capture the main findings of this special issue but also to highlight the role of populists in actively developing strategies that curtail opposition.
Notes on contributors
Paul Taggart is Professor of Politics and co-Director of the Sussex European Institute at the University of Sussex. He is author of The New Populism and the New Politics (Macmillan, 1996), Populism (Open University Press, 2000) and co-editor (with Aleks Szczerbiak) of Opposing Europe? The Comparative Party Politics of Euroscepticism (Oxford University Press, 2008) and co-editor (with Katharine Adeney) of the special issue on “The Future of Democracy” Government and Opposition (2015).
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is an Associate Professor at the School of Political Science at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile. He is the co-editor with Cas Mudde of Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) as well as the co-editor with Juan Pablo Luna of The Resilience of the Latin American Right (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
ORCID
Paul Taggart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1535-3015
Notes
1 Rovira Kaltwasser, “The Responses of Populism.”
2 Dahl, Democracy and its Critics; Dunn, Setting the People Free; Tilly, Democracy.
3 Kirshner, A Theory of Militant Democracy, 17.
4 Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism in Europe; Rovira Kaltwasser, “The Ambivalence of Populism.”
5 Rovira Kaltwasser and Taggart, “Dealing with Populists in Government.”
6 Stoner and McFaul, Transitions to Democracy.
7 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism; Levitsky and Way, “Linkage versus Leverage.”
8 Capoccia, Defending Democracy; Rummens and Abts, “Defending Democracy.” Downs, Political Extremism in Democracies
9 Canovan, Populism; Taggart, Populism; Rovira Kaltwasser and Mudde, Populism in Europe.
10 Each of these indicators oscillates between 1 and 7 (with 1 representing the most free and 7 the least free) and the average of a country's political rights and civil liberties ratings is called the “Freedom Rating.” Of course, while we are aware of the fact that the Freedom House indicators are not perfect and that there is an ongoing academic debate about how to measure democracy, we consider that these indicators help us to illustrate not only the state of democracy in the six case studies under scrutiny, but also the effectiveness of the opposition to populists in power in these countries.
11 de la Torre and Ortiz, “Populist Polarization.”
12 Bowen, “The Right and Nonparty Forms.”
13 de la Torre and Ortiz, “Populist Polarization.”
14 Hawkins, “Responding to Radical Populism.”
15 Ibid.
16 Cannon, “As Clear as MUD.”
17 Weyland, “The Threat from the Populist Left.”
18 Levitsky and Way, “Linkage versus Leverage.”
19 Batory, “Populists in Government.”
20 Müller, “Defending Democracy within the EU.”
21 Morgan, Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse, 206–216.
22 Verbeek and Zaslove, “Italy.”
23 Müller, “Defending Democracy within the EU.”
24 Bordignon and Ceccarini, “Five Stars and a Cricket.”
25 Verbeek and Zaslove, “Italy.”
26 Stanley, “Confrontation by Default.”
27 Ibid.
28 Fallend and Heinisch, “Collaboration.”
29 Gerring, Case Study Research.
30 Conaghan and de la Torre, “The Permanent Campaign of Rafael Correa.”
31 Brewer-Carías, Dismantling Democracy in Venezuela.
32 Linz and Valenzuela, The Failure of Presidential Democracies.
33 See, for instance, Cheibub and Limongi, “Democratic Institutions and Regime Survival”; Colomer and Negretto, “Can Presidentialism Work Like Parliamentarianism?”
34 Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power, “Rethinking the ‘Presidentialism Debate.’”
35 McCoy and Diez, International Mediation in Venezuela.
36 See, for instance, McCoy, “Challenges for the Collective Defense”; and Perina, “Los desafíos de la carta democrática interamericana.”
37 Levitsky and Way, “Linkage versus Leverage,” 390.
38 Batory, “Populists in Government.”
39 Müller, “Defending Democracy within the EU.”
40 Mudde, “The Populist Radical Right.”
41 Verbeek and Zaslove, “Italy.”
42 Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Populism and Political Leadership”; Rovira Kaltwasser, “Latin American Populism.”
43 Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove, “How Populist Are the People?”; Hawkins, Riding, and Mudde, “Measuring Populist Attitudes.”
44 de la Torre and Ortiz, “Populist Polarization.”
45 Batory, “Populists in Government.”
46 Hawkins, “Responding to Radical Populism.”
47 Capoccia, Defending Democracy.