Keywords

It should be clear that populism, as I and most other scholars understand it, is a threat to liberty, free markets, and the open society. Even though it is not easy to measure the influence of populist parties and leaders due to the simple fact that populism, as shown above, is hard to strictly define and delimit, there can be no doubt about its popularity and consequences. During the last decades, populist voter support and the use of populist rhetoric have increased continuously, while democracy has been backsliding, and liberty, free markets, and the open society have been curtailed.

Populist Voter Support

According to e.g., the Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index from 2019 which primarily uses scholarly literature to categorize parties, the average voter support of populist parties with authoritarian tendencies in 2018 in European democracies was 22.2%. Populist parties were part of every third European government. The combined support for left- and right-wing populist parties equaled the support for social democratic parties and was twice the size of support for liberal parties (Heinö, 2019). The same is true in many other parts of the world (Freedom House, 2019).

Kyle and Gultchin (2018) identified 46 populist leaders or political parties globally that have held executive office across 33 countries between 1990 and 2018. They found that the number of populists in power around the world had increased fivefold, from four to 20. This included countries not only in Latin America and in Eastern and Central Europe—where populism has traditionally been most prevalent—but also in Asia and Western Europe. Whereas populism was once found primarily in emerging democracies, populists are increasingly gaining power in developed democracies.

Lührmann et al. (2020), based on an extensive expert survey, created a data set examining the policy positions and organizational structures of political parties between 1970 and 2019 across 169 countries around the world, generating a dataset on 1,955 political parties across 1,560 elections. The results show that the median governing party in democracies has become more illiberal in recent decades. This means that more parties show lower commitment to political pluralism, to problems with the demonization of political opponents, to respect for fundamental minority rights, and to problems with the encouragement of political violence. Some of these parties are new entrants, but a kind of populist drift also within established parties lies behind the result.

Based on a global expert survey covering 1052 parliamentary parties in 163 countries, Norris (2020) classified parties by their use of populist or pluralist rhetoric, including their use of the abovementioned ‘us-versus-them’ logic and whether they respect or undermine liberal democratic principles. 288 parties were classified as strongly populist. Almost half of these parties (104/288 or 46%) were estimated to be economically right-wing and socially conservative, but almost as many (95/288 or 42%) were socially conservative but located on the left toward the economy. Of the rest, only a few (20/288 or 9%) expressed socialist and social liberal values. Even fewer (9/288 or 4%) favored free markets and social liberal values.

Democratic Backsliding

While the studies referred to above are primarily based on the populist rhetorical style and discourse frames used, another indication of the success of populist policies can be traced through the backsliding of democracy and liberty that has occurred in recent years. As argued above, changing the institutional orientation of democracy towards authoritarianism is a core characteristic of populism, a logical consequence of populist strategies. Leading democracy scholar Larry Diamond (2020: 1) concludes that “a global democratic recession began in 2006 and has persisted – and deepened – over the past 14 years. Not only have average levels of freedom (or democratic quality) been declining globally and in most parts of the world, but the pace of democratic breakdown accelerated, and the number of democratic transitions declined, particularly in the past five years.”

According to V-Dem Institute (2022), the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2022 is down to 1986 levels. Liberal democracies, with general elections and guaranteed civil and political rights, peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years—34 nations home to only 13% of the world’s population (V-Dem Institute, 2021). The democratic decline is especially evident in Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, as well as in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. 72% of the world population—or 5.7 billion people—today lives in different sorts of autocracies. Just ten years ago it was only 46% (V-Dem Institute, 2022).

These results are confirmed by the latest edition of the Democracy Index from The Economist. It rates the state of democracy across 167 countries on the basis of five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture, and civil liberties—and finds that the global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten in 2021. This means that more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule while just 6.4% enjoy a full democracy (Economist, 2022). Also, an index like Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (2021) shows that the global average remains unchanged for the tenth year in a row, at just 43 out of a possible 100 points.

A Worldwide Illiberal Turn

All this does not mean that general elections have disappeared or that markets have been substituted by planned economies. Instead, what has happened is that liberal institutions fundamental to both markets and democracies, as well as civil society—the rule of law, independent courts, freedom of expression, and other civic and political liberties—have been weakened or started to crumble.

A free and open society requires, as Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Dahl and many others have argued, that individual economic, civil, and political liberties are upheld, private property rights are safe, the press and media are free, the courts are independent, minorities have rights, and the democracy is constitutionally bound. A free society is a pluralistic society, not a plebiscitarian, clan society where a self-proclaimed majority has authoritarian powers.

However, according to the Human Freedom Index (2021) 83% of the global population lives in jurisdictions that have seen a fall in human freedom since 2008. That includes decreases in overall freedom in the 10 most populous countries in the world. Only 17% of the global population lives in countries that have seen increases in freedom over the same time.

Also, the pace of economic liberalization has slowed in the 2000s, compared to advances in the 1980s and 1990s, even though it continues in most countries. According to the index of economic freedom, which measures economic freedom in five dimensions (Fraser, 2021), the average economic freedom rating increased to 7.04 from 6.61 points between 2000 and 2019. However, since historic improvements in the legal structure and property rights have been the main force behind long-term gains in economic liberty (Prados de la Escosura, 2016), there are reasons to believe that the rise of populism in the coming years will have negative consequences in this regard too. In fact, according to the most recent index, which includes the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a sharp decrease in economic freedom in 2021 (Fraser, 2022).

All these threats to liberty and the open society cannot, of course, be blamed on populism alone—there are other kinds of authoritarian regimes such as China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Myanmar as well. But at least in the developed Western democracies of the world, populism is arguably a major reason.