Abstract
Departing from a critique of existing classification schemes in work on ‘militant’ and ‘defending’ democracy, the article presents a new typology for classifying initiatives opposing populist parties (IoPPs). The typology incorporates public authorities, political parties and civil society actors operating at state and supranational levels along one dimension, and tolerant and intolerant modes of engagement with populist parties on another dimension. The six types of opposition identified—rights-restrictions, ostracism, coercive confrontation, ordinary legal controls and pedagogy, forbearance, and adversarialism—are illustrated with empirical examples of opposition from populist parties in opposition and government, and by domestic actors and international organisations. The article then turns to outline methods for collecting data on IoPPs in contemporary Europe using a newspaper sampling techniques inspired by protest event and political claims analysis as a starting point. The final section presents four patterns of opposition to populist parties, ‘adapted-militancy’ (Germany), ‘political competition’ (Denmark); a ‘pincer-movement’ (Poland), and ‘differentiated ordinary opposition’ (Italy) models.
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Notes
The team continues to collect data on opposition to Fidesz and Jobbik in Hungary, Sweden Democrats, and Podemos and Vox in Spain.
A fourth subtype of ordinary legal controls and pedagogy is policy and legislative responses (see Bourne 2022 for details). It is not discussed here because policy and legislative responses often pursue more general goals in addition to opposing populist parties and require more in-depth, qualitative research methods to identify them than the ones used here.
The variables used were People_vs_elite; Antielite_salience; Corruption_salience.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tore Vincents Olsen, Francesco Campo, Mathias Holst Nicolaisen, Aleksandra Moroska-Bonkiewicz, Bénédicte Laumond, Franciszek Tyszka, Katarzyna Domagała, Juha Tuovinen, Anthoula Malkopoulou, Patrick Nitzschner and 2 anonymous reviewers for Comparative European Politics for comments on earlier versions of this paper. All errors remain fully mine.
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This research was in part financed by the Carlsberg Foundation Grant CF20-0008.
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Bourne, A. Initiatives opposing populist parties in Europe: types, methods, and patterns. Comp Eur Polit 21, 742–760 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-023-00343-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-023-00343-7