Confronting Populism

Abstract

The core populist claim is that ‘the people’ have been unjustly neglected by government. This core claim, while unexceptionable on its face, tends to be associated with claims that would corrode liberal democratic institutions. It is important that political and legal theorists identify the claims made by citizens who may be attracted by populist political forms, lest they manifest themselves in political forms toxic to (broadly understood) liberal democratic norms and institutions. They must address these claims, even as they also consider ways in which to confront these political forms. An example of how this work might proceed can be gleaned from some recent democratic theory and practice, which has ‘democratized’ membership in political parties as well as the process of selection of the party leader. This apparent democratization both disserves the cause of democratic deliberation, and opens the door to the risk of populist takeover of traditional parties.

We are still as normative political theorists coming to grips with populism. That is, we are still at the stage of debating what populism is, whether it is necessarily rather than contingently related to substantive political claims, whether those claims are more likely to be located on the ‘right’ of the political spectrum, and so on. As a result, there is still no consensus as to whether, and in what ways, populism should be viewed as a threat to (broadly understood) liberal democratic orders, and as a threat which ought to be perceived as an urgent one by a broad range of political theorists and political actors (notwithstanding their other political disagreements), or whether on the contrary the challenge is of the ordinary kind, that is, one that pits people who believe and who are prepared to act on propositions x, y and z against those who believe and are prepared to act upon propositions a, b and c, where these two sets are at least at first glance irreconcilable, but nonetheless fall within the normal range of positions held by political actors in liberal democracies.

I want to suggest that populism poses a threat. The way in which it poses a threat, I believe, is akin to the way in which Isaiah Berlin thought that positive liberty posed a threat to liberal democratic values and institutions (Berlin, 1969). That is, those aspects that are threatening are so in virtue of claims that are contingently, rather than necessarily linked to core populist claims. ¹ Much as Berlin thought that a belief in the importance of positive liberty might incline someone to also hold politically noxious views, say belief in the justifiability of the undemocratic rule of (say) the vanguard of the proletariat, or the Führer, so belief in some of populism's main claims can very often lead to a questioning of, and in the case of populist politicians, actions aimed at eroding, key aspects of the institutional armature of liberal democracies, aspects which, I will more or less stipulate in the context of the present article we have reason to value regardless of our substantive political differences on questions of economic or social policy.

What I want to do in this article is to identify the threat that populism represents, and to point to the kinds of strategies that political theorists and political scientists should adopt to confront it. I’ll proceed as follows. First, I will engage in some conceptual preliminaries that will allow me to make a suggestion about what I see as core, and what peripheral yet strongly contingently related, to populism.

Second, I will introduce a distinction between two different but complementary ways in which political and legal theorists should be taking up the challenges posed by populism. The first involves addressing some of the claims that have arguably causally fuelled the rise of populism. My working assumption in this work and elsewhere (Da Silva and Weinstock, 2022) is that populism often involves the taking up and quite often the distortion by populist politicians of political claims that can most often be articulated and addressed in ways that do not involve condoning any of the more problematic positions that populist movements often put forward. Political philosophers should address the normative validity of these claims, as they would any other argument put forward by theorists and by political actors seeking to establish the normative acceptability of their preferred policies. The second involves confronting the more destructive claims made by populists, claims which, as we shall see, threaten the integrity of core liberal democratic institutions. While such strategic reasoning may seem outside the traditional purview of political theorists, I will try to show that even here political theory has a role, most notably in identifying arguments that have gained some traction among political actors, and which have, often unwittingly, facilitated the accession of populists to positions of power.

Third, I will provide an example of the kind of strategy that might be deployed in order to confront the threat that populism poses. I will briefly point to the ways in which changes that have been made in many liberal democracies to our understanding of the ways in which political parties are organized may have inadvertently opened the door to populist takeovers, and that there are both independent reasons, and reasons to do with the rise of populism, to reverse these changes.

I

If one situated oneself at a purely etymological level, ‘populism’ suggests the idea that ‘the people’ should be given more weight when one considers political affairs than they are under different dispensations, including presumably and liberal democracy. In the same way that ‘communitarianism’ denoted the idea that political ideas and institutions should give more place to ideas of community, and ‘liberalism’ gives pride of place to individual rights and liberties, populism suggests that we give more weight to ‘the people’.

Understood in this manner, populism seems an utterly innocuous idea. It seems to be synonymous with, or at the very least closely conceptually connected with the concept of democracy itself. What is there to oppose here? ‘Populist’ has come to sound, at least in some quarters, like a derogatory term, but if all there is about populism is its invitation to us to give normative weight to ‘the people’, then, to borrow a phrase from Jan-Werner Müller, can it be that to say of a politician that they are a ‘populist’ simply denotes ‘a successful politician one doesn’t like’? (Müller, 2016).

We get a sense of the distinctiveness of populism when we realize that, like many ‘isms’, it is implicitly contrastive. In much the same way that ‘communitarianism’ invited us to pay more attention to the importance that communities have, or ought to have, in the lives of individuals, rather than focussing exclusively on the rights and liberties of those individuals, the implication being that those communities had been unjustly or erroneously occluded from view by the mainstream of political theory and practice, so populists entreat us to attend to the fact that political theory and practice have for too long ignored the people, to the benefit of x, where x signifies some entity that has according to those who hold populist views been playing too great a role in the politics of the society to which the people belong, and whose interests have been reflected to too great a degree in the theories used in order to adjudicate claims within society's social, legal and political institutions.

This formal contrastive claim is compatible with a number of different values of x. On the left of the political spectrum, x might be identified with ‘the 1%’ or with ‘Capital’. On the right, it can be identified ethnoculturally, with the ‘real’ people being those that are really ‘from’ here and x being the ethnoculturally other, whether the ethnoculturally other is perceived potentially as a ‘fifth column’ explicitly committed to undermining the interests of the people or whether it is simply perceived as having interests that are distinct from and durably incompatible with those of the people.

Understanding populism contrastively also allows us to appreciate that it is a set of claims that is not developed in a temporally abstracted way, but rather, that these claims are introduced into ongoing political debates and struggles. Populists emerge where the perception exists (whether it is justified or not) that as a matter of fact, the interests of x have been dominant in the ways in social, political and economic decision-making has been made and policies implemented. These policies are viewed as being in the interests of x rather than those of the people. Populism is a corrective to this perception. It aims to realign policy and governance with the interests of the people.

Implicit in this dynamic and contrastive view of how populism emerges as a political force is a suspicion of political and economic elites. After all, according to this view, it is not an accident that policy is as misaligned with the interests of the people as populists claim it to be. Rather, it is due to the dominant political agency of the groups that make the policy, that lobby for it and that organize other political parties to sue for the interests of x, and so on. It is, in other words, the fault of the elites, or more specifically, of those elites that have taken power or that threaten to do so by taking up the cause of whatever force is seen as corrosive of the interests of the people.

Now, anti-elitism is not in and of itself something to be deplored. On the contrary, it can serve as a useful corrective to political tendencies even in democracies to become detached from the concerns of the citizenry. As Macedo and Mansbridge have observed, ‘when a large group has designated itself “the people” and has come to see itself in a moral battle against the “elites”, the members of that group have often had significant interests and values that political elites have neglected or even denigrated’ (Mansbridge and Macedo, 2019: 70). Problems arise when the diagnosis provided by populists of the ability of elites to rise to power in this manner points to the vulnerability to elite takeover of key institutions of liberal representative democracy, such as multiparty elections, constitutional guarantees of rights and freedoms, independent courts and the like.

A number of other positions are contingently connected to this celebration of ‘the people’ and to the concomitant suspicion of elites in the manner just suggested. That is, they are not logically connected to the elevation to a normatively primary position of ‘the people’, but rather are suggested by the diagnosis that some populists make of the subjugation of the people as being rooted in some fatal flaw of liberal democratic institutions. Thus, for example, a prominent populist position is that of anti-pluralism (Galston, 2020). For anti-pluralists, those who defend political and economic positions that differ from those that populists put forward are not just political opponents, who defend rival political positions in pluralist political space, and who as a matter of the normal functioning of democratic adversarial institutions will normally, at some point, come to power, but enemies, whose political positions are seen as assaults to be repelled, rather than as plausible and legitimate positions to be argued with. According to this anti-pluralist stance, the standard democratic claim according to which it is normal and even desirable for the parties that represent those enemies to have a turn in running the affairs of state is akin to claiming that it is acceptable for those enemies with whom we are at war to from time to time win a battle, or win the war and get to impose their will upon us. Political opponents do not on this view represent another, contestable way to represent the common good, one with which we may disagree and against which we argue and contest elections. Rather, they are enemies, to be vanquished. Another way of making the point is to observe that populism looks with suspicion, if not with disdain, at the very notion of a loyal opposition.

The second position related in much the same contingent way to the main populist claim has to do with a distinctive way in which to interpret electoral results, and in particular of electoral victories. A number of democratic and constitutional theorists who have in recent years attempted to understand the points of vulnerability in contemporary democratic orders have emphasized the fact that central to democracy is the shared belief, and the commitment to the concomitant practices, of transition of power. It is central to the functioning of democracy that electoral losers be able to reconcile themselves to their loss by the fact that they will be allowed to contest elections anew, and that they may very well prevail in these new electoral contests (Przeworski, 2018). An election in a well-functioning democracy is a moment in what Samuel Issacharoff has felicitously called a ‘repeat play’ process. ² Populists view electoral success as on a par with military victory, something that should be viewed as final, rather than just a moment in an ongoing process in which one will find oneself over time both on the government and on the opposition benches. Populists tend to conflate elections with plebiscites, in that they are seen as settling a set of issues once and for all, rather than simply as choosing office holders who will hold office for a time. ‘For both plebiscites and populism, the election defines the agenda. Period’. ³

The third closely connected claim, again quite closely linked to the latter, is a suspicion of the institutions of liberal democracy, and a relative lack of restraint in taking steps that might erode those institutions. After all, on the view we are considering, if those institutions have heretofore been used to deny the interests of the people, and if the return to power of those who have until now occupied those institutions in order to serve the interests of the enemies of the people is one possible result of the operation of those institutions, then they are owed no respect or allegiance. On the contrary, it is for the populist quite normal for steps to be taken to make more difficult, or even impossible, the alternance in power which is usually seen as evincing the normal operation of these institutions. Such steps can go from ones that often pass under the radar, such as changes in electoral laws that make it more difficult for ‘the enemy’ to participate in elections, or changes in norms and laws enforcing term limits, to quite frontal and visible assaults, such as attacks on the independence of the judiciary, of electoral commissions and on the freedom of an independent press. If one sees the return to power of the opposition not as a normal moment in the back-and-forth of electoral alternance, but as a capitulation to an enemy, an enemy which moreover has used these institutions for the benefit of the enemies of the people, then it can come to seem quite normal and ethically unproblematic to shore up the defences by eliminating tools within the democratic institution that might be exploited by enemies aiming to return to power. Wojciech Sadurski's Poland Constitutional Breakdown (Sadurski, 2019) tells the story of how these tendencies have been realized in one country, namely Poland, but similar narratives could be given of recent developments in a host of other countries, including Hungary (Halmai, 2018) and Turkey (Varol, 2018).

The distinction between core commitments of populism, and commitments that are only contingently related to that core, allow us to resist the temptation of rejecting populism in a wholesale manner, and to identify ways in which the potentially salutary aspects of populism can be separated from the more noxious manifestations that real-world populisms have tended to present in the cases referred to above (as well as in others). ⁴ It also allows us to start to identify bulwarks that can be put in place in order to avoid the descent of populism (understood as a potentially healthy corrective to the neglect by political elites of issues that matter to ‘the people’) into populism as a political force corrosive of core liberal-democratic institutions – or at least to identify ways in which positions taken by liberal democratic theorists and in some cases even by policymakers and institutional designers might unwittingly have laid the groundwork for the populist attack on such institutions. A worthwhile task for political and legal theorists, one to which I hope that this article will contribute modestly, is to identify such mechanisms.

II

It is important to note at the outset that populism is in a sense a formal rather than a substantive set of claims. That is, at its core it tells us that something that matters a great deal to the people has been unjustly neglected by political elites, and that that neglect should be addressed, but it does not, in and of itself, tell us what that is. The populist structure, as well as the populist descent into populist illiberalism, is available to a number of different kinds of political claims located at both ends of the political spectrum (Owen, 2022).

One of those, which tends to give rise to populisms of the nationalist right, have to do with culture, and with the concern that various political processes that political elites are insufficiently concerned about, or that they might even be complicit in, such as large-scale immigration, cultural and linguistic globalization, the discourse of minority rights and other associated political and social phenomena, are placing local cultures at risk (Hochschild, 2016). There is the sense that cultural majorities are in some cases as vulnerable to global phenomena as cultural minorities are to majoritarianism within nation-states, but that the former set of vulnerabilities have not captured the attention of political theorists or, more significantly, of political elites, to the same degree that the latter have. This set of claims are easily leveraged and distorted by right-wing ethno-nationalist political movements.

Another has to do with the economic consequences of globalization, which have disrupted and in some cases destroyed local economies and ways of life (Apostolidis, 2022; Eichengreen, 2018). These have led to populisms that have tended to be protectionist, and that have been endorsed by politicians of the left, some of them, such as Bernie Sanders in the United States, deeply respectful of liberal democratic institutions, and others, such as Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, significantly less so.

There may be other political claims that have fuelled the rise of populist politics in different countries (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). My intent here is not to draw up an exhaustive list of such claims, but rather to suggest that the kind of populist politics that is threatening to liberal democratic order arises from the coming together of a set of political claims with a populist political and legal form. Now, that form does not leave the content provided by the kinds of political claims unaltered. Populist form contingently related to what I have identified as the core populist claim tends to shape further political claims to fit its pre-existing categories. Thus, the erosion of culture is viewed not as the result of sociolinguistic and broader cultural forces that need to be addressed, but rather as the foreseeable result of the deliberate or at the very least the neglectful agency of elite political actors, and by the insufficiency of liberal democratic institutions to serve as a set of bulwarks to their actions. According to this view, the reason that the problems that the political claims that give substance to populism have arisen is that elites have been, at best, insufficiently attentive to the forces that have generated these problems (they are, again according to this view, blithely neglectful of the corrosive impact of globalization, e.g.), and at worst, complicit with the agents that have been the vehicles of these harms. The tendency of populist pundits and politicians is in other words to interpret the claims made on behalf of endangered cultures and of beleaguered economic actors through the theoretical lenses provided to them by the form that populism, on the Berlinian analysis offered here, tends to adopt. And as we have seen, this can give rise to a number of problematic propositions to do with the institutions of liberal democracy.

Once we have distinguished, as I have proposed that we do, between, on the one hand, the claims that have provided the substance of a number of populist movements, and on the other, the institutional proposals that tend to flow from these claims once they have been filtered through an anti-pluralist, anti-liberal democratic lens, we are in a better position to distinguish between the two very different kinds of challenges that populism poses for liberal democratic theorists, that is, for theorists who, regardless of their differences on a wide range of issues to do, for example, with questions of socio-economic justice, or with the legal permissibility of controversial behaviours such as drug use, medical assistance in dying, or sex work, or with a host of other issues that routinely fill the pages of specialized journals in moral, political and legal philosophy, nonetheless share the view that the basic package of liberal democratic institutions, including protections of the rights of individuals and of minority groups, some form of free competitive elections, representative government, division of powers and the like, constitute a plausible institutional framework for the conduct of politics.

On the one hand, the claims that fuel populist politics must be addressed. By this, I mean that we must consider the validity of these claims just as one would any other proposal with policy relevance. There are two reasons why the claims made by those who might become tempted by populist politics must be addressed. First, it is a fundamental tenet of democratic life that we must adopt a stance of prima facie openness to the concerns of our fellow citizens, and to the claims for policy change that are grounded in these concerns. This is not to say that the stance of citizens towards one another should be uncritical – far from it. But it is to claim that democratic citizenship, which the work of legal and political theorists is an integral part, requires of citizens that they give one another a critical hearing.

Second, it is not an implausible empirical hypothesis (one that needs to be tested using appropriate empirical methods) that part of the reason for the success of populist politicians has to do with their willingness to entertain (and then to distort) the claims made by members of majorities who political and legal theorists, as well as liberal elites, have tended to neglect altogether (Frank, 2020). If this hypothesis is correct, then there is a very strong practical reason to attend to these claims, which is that failing to address them risks causing them to get expressed in a manner deeply corrosive of liberal democratic institutions. Democratic deliberation is not just about assessing the claims made by our fellow citizens. It is also about transforming them (whether ‘theirs’ or ‘ours’) in a manner compatible with our other moral and political commitments, including our commitments to liberal democratic fundamentals. Reflective equilibrium is a dynamic, collective process. There may be some claims made by some of our fellow citizens that must simply be rejected, but democratic deliberation involves at least to some degree proposing formulations of our political opponents’ claims that make them as compatible as possible with fundamental liberal democratic tenets, to do with the respect of individual rights, of democratic modes of decision-making, and of at least basic forms of liberal procedures and institutions. ⁵

Political and legal theorists are thus well advised, for substantive as well as for practical reasons, to address the concerns made by their fellow citizens whose positions may incline them towards populist politics, and more worryingly, to the positions to do with pluralism and with the nature of democratic politics that I have identified above as corrosive of broadly construed liberal democratic order.

But they must also participate in the task of trying to identify bulwarks that might stand in the way of the potential populist descent into illiberal and anti-democratic politics that such concerns can become associated with when they are filtered through the formal.

At first glance, this second task might seem better suited to political scientists than to legal and political theorists. After all, the goal here is to make it less likely that those who are intent on leveraging support for the core populist claim in order to erode liberal democratic institutions in the manner that we have seen populist politicians do are able to do so. This would seem to involve investigating and uncovering the right political pressure points in the empirical world of cause and effect. But this would be to ignore the fact that ideas have effects in the real world, and that some of the pathways that have allowed populist politicians to achieve positions of power through the exploitation of some of the tendencies of populism that we have uncovered above may have resulted from ideas that either originated in the realm of political and legal theory, or at the very least find echoes in arguments that have found favour among theorists. The position that I want to make at least plausible is that a danger of this kind resides in the theory of institutional design, the point at which ideas and institutions meet. Though I will in the context of this brief article be referring to a very specific example, to do with the way in which political parties choose leaders, my intention is to open a broader research agenda aimed at identifying points of vulnerability in liberal democratic institutions that are due to the attempt at implementing ideas through those institutions that inadvertently open the door to populist takeover of those institutions.

III

Let me first identify two kinds of strategies that are unlikely to succeed in providing the requisite bulwarks preventing prima facie plausible populist claims from becoming distorted and associated with the kinds of anti-liberal democratic positions with which I have been concerned in this article. The first is constitutional in nature. Why not simply enshrine the principles and institutions that are felt to be non-negotiable for any liberal-democratic order through the use of such constitutional devices as ‘eternity clauses’ (Suteu, 2021)? It is one thing to engage in comparative constitutional investigation of different constitutional orders in order to identify what features have in certain countries permitted significant ‘democratic backsliding’, and what features have to the contrary permitted other countries to render themselves relatively immune to the kinds of attacks on democratic institutions and norms that populists are more likely to engage in in virtue of their core beliefs (Bermeo, 2016). It is quite another to be able to make changes to constitutions, based perhaps on studies indicating what has worked in other countries. This is so for at least the following reasons. First, constitutions are hard to amend, as a matter of institutional design. Constitutions are seen as higher law, and therefore of aspiring to a robustness that ordinary law does not possess. The legitimacy of changing a constitution in order to respond to a particular political exigency, such as the emergence on the political scene of a populist political force, seems to run afoul of the relative permanence of constitutional law, to the fact that the legitimacy of its provisions is at least in part due to the fact that they are perceived as foundational, rather than as tactical or strategic. There are as Bruce Ackerman has shown us ‘constitutional moments’ in the history of polities that are conducive to constitutional change. The risk of attempting to amend a constitution when a society is in the midst of the political upheaval that populist politicians thrive on is that such a process will come to be seen as a tactical political move masquerading as a non-political one. It would thus risk lacking the legitimacy that constitutional changes require. Constitutional protections are not self-upholding. They rely on the support of the population and of key constitutional actors, such as courts.

What's more, even if such norms are still present within the judiciary, and among vast tracts of the population, the robustness and effectiveness of constitutional guarantees depends upon the willingness of populist politicians, who most often ground their rule in the control of the executive branch (Issacharoff, 2018: 450–451) to be bound by them. Already established constitutions may, by original design or by dumb luck, have possessed some features that made the polity more immune than others to populist politics, but by the time populism has emerged as a significant political force within a polity, constitutionalism has probably already shown its impotence in dealing with populist threat. This is one of the reasons that Ginsberg and Huq in their influential work How to Save a Constitutional Democracy conclude that ‘constitutions cannot save democracy’ (Ginsburg and Huq, 2016: 240).

Similar considerations speak against the adoption of non-constitutional policies specifically designed to block populists from coming to power, or from engaging in policies aimed at eroding democracy once they are in power. Take, for example, the range of policies that have been bundled together under the term ‘militant democracy’, that is, policies that seek to make it harder or even impossible for parties that aim at eroding democracy to be able to engage legally in democratic politics (Kushner, 2014; Sajo, 2004). One of many challenges to such policies stems from the fact that populist parties rarely wear their institutional designs on their sleeves. Though, as we have seen, there is a Berlinian, probabilistic association between many of the substantive views of populists and the ways in which they conceive of the institutions of democracy, political rights cannot be abridged on the basis of such associations. Policies aimed at protecting democracy from populism therefore risk being unduly restrictive of political and social rights, and based on the imputation of anti-democratic motives that will commonly outstrip the available evidence.

But there may be a third road to protecting democracy from populist threat, one that differs both from constitutionalism and from purpose-built policies of the kind that militant democrats have proposed. It is to identify principles of liberal democratic institutional design that provide populists with potential political footholds, and to modify – or better yet, not to adopt – those principles and associated policies in cases where there may be independent reasons rooted in sound liberal democratic theory to do so. The general principle that I want to question is that for any institutional mechanism in the complex institutional architecture of democracy, it is always the case that it should be democratized, that is, that it should be subjected to the popular will. The particular instantiation of that (in my view false) position that I want to investigate briefly resides in the associated practices, which have become increasingly widespread in many countries and across the political spectrum, for political parties to hand the selection of party leaders over to party members, and to lower the bar for membership to a very small financial contribution that can be made quite shortly before the process of leader selection gets underway.

The institutions that sustain democracy, as Nancy Bermeo notes at the outset of her important article, are ‘myriad’ (Bermeo, 2016: 5). This means that there are a great many choices that institutional designers must make in order to realize an actual democratic regime. These choices must, I would argue, be made holistically rather than in a piecemeal manner. By this I mean that institutional choices must be made with a view to ensuring that the democratic system as a whole satisfies core democratic principles, rather than by trying to make it be the case that each institution within a complex democratic system functions democratically. There is something that one might call a ‘democratic fallacy of composition’ in thinking that because we want a complex system of institutions to function democratically when considered globally, we should want each part of that institutional framework to function democratically when taken in isolation. Democracy everywhere can lead to less democracy overall. To illustrate this claim with a telling example, the effectiveness of an electoral commission in providing the electoral system with the requisite safeguards against tampering and fraud resides at least in part in its being immunized from the cut and thrust of ordinary partisan democratic politics.

There are proximate and distal causes to the rise of democracy-eroding populism. We have briefly identified some plausible candidates for distal causes, to do with the growing sense of economic insecurity and of cultural dislocation of working and ‘middle’ classes. As I have suggested, liberal democratic theorists must address the claims that arguably serve as distal causes while confronting the more proximate causes that contribute to such claims becoming distorted and pressed into service by populist politicians intending to launch attacks upon key liberal democratic institutions. In a recent article, Kim Lane Scheppele has identified a plausible candidate for a more proximate cause of this kind built into the institutional design of all modern democracies, to do with the health of their political parties. Scheppele's overall point is basically this: political parties in most democracies still exist in Left–Right space, where in fact the main operative tension in modern politics opposed ‘cosmopolitan/globalists’ and ‘nationalists/localists’. In her view, conflicts between these forces now occur within traditional parties, in ways that threaten internal ‘civil war’. Out of this state of intra-party chaos can emerge either the takeover of traditional parties advertised as traditional left or right-wing parties by nationalist/localist populists, or the collapse of such parties and their replacement by parties that are built entirely around the agenda of a political strongman. Scheppele's conclusion is that the ‘health’ of political parties is of signal importance to the health of the democracies to which they belong. To quote Scheppele at length: ‘In order for democratic regeneration to occur, […], reliable institutions with the democracy's general health in mind must screen this steady supply of new entrants into politics. If new people and new ideas enter politics without being vetted effectively by strong and sensible political parties, then voters who vote to rotate power – as voters should do frequently in a robust democracy – may be inadvertently voting to kill their democratic institutions instead’ (Scheppele, 2018).

Scheppele's argument strikes me as largely correct. In the context of functioning liberal democracies, the most efficient way for populist politicians to enact their plans for populist institutional reform is to take over already existing political parties so as to be able to leverage their resources, human and otherwise, and perhaps most importantly also their ‘brand’. But her argument is short on detail about how exactly such vetting should occur, and what grounds might be adduced to justify such vetting mechanisms, other than that of ‘keeping out populists’. Taking a cue from the recent literature in political theory on political parties might be a good way to start.

There has in recent years been a remarkable resurgence in writing by political philosophers about political parties, long relegated by theorists to the backwater of ‘empirical’ political science. Partisanship, political theorists now realize to a greater degree than they once did, is an ineliminable part of democratic political life, and thinking about how to specify its normative virtues so as to better know how to regulate it is a task that democratic theorists have for too long ignored (Muirhead, 2014; McCall Rosenbluth and Shapiro, 2018; Rosenblum, 2010; White and Ypi, 2016).

Most of the authors who have written on the role of political parties in recent years have emphasized their epistemic function. Among other things, political parties have the responsibility vis à vis the electorate to organize political space, to make what would otherwise appear to most voters as an unmanageably complex welter of considerations of different orders into coherent wholes. To emphasize a concept and a related practice that has been central in my own writing on political parties, the drafting of platforms by political parties performs a central role in allowing voters to make informed choices with their votes. Platforms organize the full range of policy decisions that a government has to make into a coherent package, where the values that govern the policy choices put forward, and the necessary trade-offs made are clearly identified and shown to give rise to different sets of choices from party to party. Choosing among platforms makes political choice tractable for ordinary voters (McCall Rosenbluth and Shapiro, 2018; Weinstock, 2015a).

Recognizing this fact gives rise to an (apparent) paradox. The drafting of a platform is a highly complex endeavour, one that relies on a great deal of expertise. It is in other words, at least in part, an elite-driven process. In order for citizens to be engaged in the (eminently democratic) exercise of selecting a party platform that represents a competently drafted set of policies governed by overarching normative commitments with which citizens identify, some stage of the process must be given over to elites of various kinds. Some of the elites in question must be epistemic. Given the complexity of the scientific and technological knowledge that is required, for example, in order to draft health policy, people who know something about medicine, about public health, about health economics and so on, must be given an important role with respect to proposals having to do with health. Some of that expertise must moreover be political. Given the kinds of negotiations and compromises that must be made in order to bundle policy proposals emanating from different sets of experts into a whole made up of compossible parts, politicians adept at forging compromises must also have their say. It is only if epistemic and political elites have a chance to draft high-quality platforms in institutional spaces that are not themselves fully democratic that democratic deliberation among citizens in the run-up to elections can aspire to the quality that some deliberative democrats have hoped for.

Now, to claim that it is elite-driven does not preclude the desirability of intra-party democracy. The decisions that have to be made, the trade-offs that have to be consented to, in order to be able to put a coherent policy package forward to the electorate, requires internal deliberation and debate (Wolkenstein, 2020). ⁶ But it is nonetheless the case that putting together a responsible platform to the electorate requires the work (e.g. at policy conventions) of party insiders who devote a lot of time to thinking through the issues that need to be addressed in order to organize the almost infinite range of possible policy options into an organized proposal that can be intelligently and deliberatively considered by the electorate (rather than having that electorate make its political choices on the basis of extraneous considerations such as candidate charisma and the like).

Now, one of the most consequential decisions a political party makes in this regard is to choose a leader. Even in a parliamentary system, the party leader exercises a huge influence on the policy decisions made by the party. Westminster parliamentary systems, for example, concentrate a great deal of power in the office of the Prime Minister, given the party discipline that is imposed within such systems on elected representatives by ‘party whips’. It is rarely if ever the case that the party leader is simply the mouthpiece for policy proposals that have been made independently of his or her political agency. On the contrary, changes of political leaders usually signal changes in a party's policy orientations. Thus, it would be counterproductive to recognize the elite-driven character of the process of policy formation within political parties while insisting upon the selection of the party leader in ways which risk running afoul of that process.

It would stand to reason, therefore, that those who are centrally involved in the process of policy articulation should have significant weight in the selection of a party leader as well. But in an increasing number of countries, the trend has gone in the opposition direction. Leaders are elected by party members, and membership has been reduced to a small annual membership fee (one that can moreover be paid in the days or weeks previous to the selection of a party leader), rather than consisting in any substantive participation in policy affairs. When he was campaigning for the job, Justin Trudeau argued for the transformation of the Liberal Party into a ‘movement’, that simply required registration, not much more than a Facebook ‘like’. Trudeau was perhaps drawing inspiration from Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the British Labour Party. Corbyn's ability to leverage the support of a broad movement, Momentum, allowed him on numerous occasions to deflect the opposition to his leadership exercised by the parliamentary Party. And perhaps most fatefully, Donald Trump's ascent to the Presidency of the United States was greatly facilitated by the watering down that had occurred within the Republican Party of the institution of the ‘super-delegate’, which effectively allows party elites to retain some degree of control of the nominating process (Bitecofer, 2018). (The relatively greater robustness of that institutional device within the Democratic Party effectively blocked the nomination of Bernie Sanders).

Having a party leader elected by the whole party membership, and having membership involve nothing more than an on-line registration and perhaps a small annual fee, as opposed to any real engagement, may seem like important steps in the direction of the ‘democratization’ of political parties. But when one takes a deeper look at the epistemic function that political parties play, this ‘democratic’ practice begins to appear quite problematic. Indeed, democratic deliberation at election time over rival party platforms is enhanced when those party platforms reflect expert contributions to the difficult questions of policy and of trade-offs among policies that invariably emerge when a set of policies is being chosen. The quality of democratic choice may require moments of elite-driven generation of policy proposals. As I’ve suggested, the overall quality of a democracy does not depend upon all of its moving parts being run democratically. Indeed, it may require the very opposite, namely, that certain choices be taken through institutional devices that are not in and of themselves democratic (McCall Rosenbluth and Shapiro, 2018; Weinstock, 2015b).

The ‘popular’ selection of party leaders means that the working members of the party have little or no ability to vet the selection of their leader, contrary to the very sensible warning that Scheppele has issued to do with the importance of such vetting devices. This can give rise to all manner of pathology. I’ve emphasized the disconnect between the elite-driven nature of policy choice and the popular nature of the selection of leaders. But among the pathologies that are invited into the process through the ‘democratization’ of the choice of leaders is the possibility of allowing a populist leader to take the reins of power by appealing directly to prospective members, rather than by convincing active members and the parliamentary party of their suitability and conformity with party values. The direct election of leaders allows prospective populists to take over an existing party by bringing in members who had never had any involvement with the party.

If the foregoing analysis is plausible, then moves in the direction of the democratic election of party leaders are only dubiously democratic, in that they make it more difficult for political parties to carry out their important epistemic functions. In so doing, they also open the door to populist threat (though the dubiousness of their democratic pedigree is, in and of itself, sufficient to reject it). There are therefore both reasons of democratic principle, and strategic reasons to do with the closing of possible avenues to populist takeovers of existing political parties, to restrict the range and kind of members who get to choose a party leader. What's more, the reasons of principle and the more pragmatic considerations are intimately connected. It is the degradation of the capacity that parties have to perform their epistemic function that makes them vulnerable to the kinds of epistemic shortcuts that are typical of the kinds of ‘us and them’ populist politics that are the central concern of this article.

Now, one may argue that the kind of democratization that I have been considering here has resulted from an attempt by traditional parties to address a sense of disaffection that many citizens experience with traditional political parties, and with the traditional political processes which, in many jurisdictions, seem to artificially limit the supply of political parties to a couple of ‘big tent’ parties that make it difficult for new political ideas to be expressed. ⁷ This may very well be true. But this problem, to the extent that it is a problem, is not best addressed by rendering membership close to meaningless. Rather, political parties must find avenues though which members can be turned into active participants. At the very least, this might require a longer period of time between the initial payment of party membership dues and the right to participate in party elections. But it probably requires making membership into a more active, participatory practice.

I return to Scheppele's exhortation that the avoidance of populist threat might require that ‘non-partisan institutions like constitutional courts or neutral election commissions must be charged with checking the general health of parties and party systems’ (Scheppele, 2018: 512). I have doubts about a couple of elements of this claim. First, it does not seem to be part of the remit of constitutional courts that they check in on political parties, though it seems entirely appropriate that this fall to independent electoral commissions. Second, the setting up of the kind of controls on democratic ‘health’ called for by Scheppele requires touchstones and rules more precise than those that she provides. The requirement that parties provide an electoral commission with platforms satisfying certain criteria (eg full costing and the like) as a condition of being able to contest elections may disincentivize parties from risking their takeover by opportunistic populist politicians seeking to remake parties in their image. It may provide them with an incentive at the very least to retain significant prerogative to active party members and to the parliamentary party to wield significant impact on the choice of party leader. This would make it less likely than might otherwise be the case that an anti-elite message of populist candidates would resonate sufficiently to allow for the populist takeover of an established party.

But the general point seems to me to be valid. There are myriad elements of institutional design that contribute, in ways that often operate under the radar, to the integrity and resilience of democratic systems. Many of these are not ‘democratic’ on their face. Independent electoral commissions, Parliamentary budget officers, Auditors general and the like, are all examples of features of the complex institutional design of modern democracies that do not function democratically, but that protect democracy against such corrosive processes as electoral fraud and budgetary obfuscation which may be more frequently found among populist politicians. But they do so, unlike purpose-built policies aimed at protecting democracy against distinctively populist threats of the kind that I described in the first section of this article, without bearing the potentially unsustainable burden of showing that a given party or aspiring political leader really would realize the threats that populism poses. I think that it is an interesting and important research agenda for democratic theorists to canvas the various elements of democratic systems for signs of vulnerability, and to identify potential remedies thereto, on democratic rather than on distinctively anti-populist grounds.

Conclusion

I’ve wanted to make three points at least plausible in this article. First, there is a ‘berlinian’ contingent connection between the core claims of populist politics, and the endorsement of policies and claims that are hostile to central dimensions of liberal democratic polities. Second, responding to the populist challenge involves both addressing the claims that may have fuelled it, and confronting the threats that it poses. Third, confronting populist threats involves identifying points of vulnerability in the institutional design of actually existing democracies, and finding ways of addressing them on the basis of democratic, rather than distinctively anti-populist grounds. I provided the example of the tendency of modern political parties to want to democratize leadership selection as an example of the kind of vulnerable design feature I have in mind. Doubtless, there are others. As the threat of populism increases in just about every part of the world, the identification of such features of democratic systems that would seem at first glance to fall afoul of democratic strictures (but which on further analysis actually strengthen the capacity of democratic systems to perform key democratic functions), and which therefore represent targets for populist politicians seeking to drape themselves in a patina of democratic legitimacy would seem to represent quite a worthwhile research agenda for political scientists and political theorists to join forces on.