Do populist parties promote direct democracy? An empirical assessment in 29 countries in the last two decades

ABSTRACT

Populism is often associated with direct democracy. However, empirical support for this connection remains limited. Analysing a unique dataset on national referendums across 29 countries, this study challenges the presumption that populists are more inclined to advocate for referendums. Surprisingly, populists exhibit this tendency primarily when in opposition. Despite the increasing inclusion of populist parties in coalition governments, their impact on facilitating national-level direct democracy is more complex than anticipated. Utilising V-DEM data over 30 years, we find that populists prima facie enhance the use of direct democracy. However, this effect is contingent on contextual factors, such as party system institutionalisation and the democracy's age, indicating a nuanced relationship between populism and direct democratic practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• direct democracy
• referendums
• participation
• populist parties
• Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 V-dem groups these four indexes in four higher-order indexes, the citizen-initiated component of direct popular vote index (v2xdd_cic) and the top-down component of direct popular vote index (v2xdd_toc). The citizen-initiated component of direct popular vote index is the normalised average of the scores of both indices of citizen-initiated mechanism of direct democracy popular initiatives and referendums (v2xdd_i_ci and v2xdd_i_rf), while the latter is the normalised average of the scores of both indices of mechanism of direct democracy which are not citizen-initiated obligatory referendums and plebiscites (v2xdd_cic and v2xdd_toc). As we are interested in looking at the impact of populist in government on specific implementations of direct democracy, we will not use those higher-order indexes, but we stick to the main lower-order indexes.

2 In case there is more than one populist party in government we recode their presence in the government as follows: if two or more populist parties are all junior partners, we include them among the category “junior partner”, if one populist party is a major partner and one or more than one is a junior partner, we consider the country as having a major partner in government.

3 In some cases, the data were not available from 1990: as a general rule, for countries that democratise after 1989 we start with the first elected government under the democratic rule. In total we have 887 observations. To further corroborate our findings, we re-run our models by including the same timespan of the first part of the analyses (2000-2020). Overall, the results are robust, see Appendix, Robustness Checks.

4 As we did before, we also tested a possible non-linear effect of the age of democracy. The results of this analysis (depicted in Table 5A, in the Appendix) provide us with mixed evidence: on the one hand, we do not find any curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on the citizens’ initiative index and the obligatory referendum index (respectively Models 1 and 3); on the other, there are (admittedly weak) signs of a non-linear effect on the referendum index (Model 2).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 773023).

Notes on contributors

Davide Angelucci

Davide Angelucci is a lecturer in Political Science at the Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome, and member of the CISE (Italian Centre for Electoral Studies). He holds a PhD at the University of Siena. His research focuses on electoral behaviour, political participation, and European politics. His research has recently appeared on European Union Politics and the Italian Political Science Review. From 2020 he is adjunct professor of Political Science and Data Analysis for Social Sciences.

Sebastien Rojon

Sebastien Rojon is a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. His research focuses on citizens’ political engagement and attitudes towards democratic reform.

Davide Vittori

Davide Vittori is a postdoctoral researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles and adjunct professor at the University of Antwerp. He was previously post-doc at LUISS University (Rome). He works mainly on process preferences, political parties, populism and voting behaviour. His works were published by Comparative European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Government & Opposition, Electoral Studies, South European Politics and Societies and others.