Populism as moral pressure : towards a conceptualisation of the impact of populism on public policymaking in parliament

Abstract

Democratic public policymaking in Western democracies is guaranteed institutionally by parliamentary representation. While most research reduces the impact of populism on public policy to party politics and government formation, this article tackles populism from a sociological point of view. Populism is conceived as moral pressure that influences Members of Parliament’s representative behaviour in public policymaking far beyond elections and constitutional engineering. Legislators are socialised into specific representative and legislative roles over the course of their careers. These roles are ideal-typically twisted towards more intermediated ‘trusteeship’ for proportional democracies and more direct ‘delegateship’ for majoritarian democracies. Drawing on both the policymaking literature and comparative sociology, this paper theorises how populist moral pressure for less intermediated and less pluralist forms of democracy changes informal rules of policymaking in the wider context of state–society relations. Populist moral pressure pushes Members of Parliament to act more like delegates – which is a less intermediate form of representation. With the help of ideal types, we show how populist moral pressure exerts a differentiated impact on democratic practices in majoritarian than in proportional democracies. Primary difference is that it breaks with institutionalised legitimation norms in proportional democracies. The article suggests that future research on the impact of populism should focus more strongly on populism as behaviour, democratic belief systems, and the informal contexts in which it operates.