Populist parties and democracy reforms: a quest for transforming representative democracies?

Populist parties’ key claims include the transformation of representative democracies by favouring a direct relationship with political institutions. Nonetheless, populist proposals regarding democracy reforms remain a rather understudied topic beyond direct democracy. This paper aims to extend the existing scholarship on the relation between populism and democratic representation by addressing two main angles: the lack of an extensive inquiry of populist democratic agendas, and their impact on political representation. Therefore, it explores if populist parties’ democratic agendas conceive an alternative understanding of representative democracy. Through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of party manifestos by inclusionary, exclusionary, and non-populist parties in five Southern European countries, this study assesses the institutions covered by proposals of institutional change, and the representative dimensions and direction there implied. Results mainly suggest that host ideologies, rather than populism, have a major role in shaping democracy agendas. Whereas inclusionary populism stresses inclusive reforms and participatory politics, the exclusionary counterparts put forward a noteworthy number of exclusive reforms, namely regarding the representative function. These differences are mostly visible for descriptive and symbolic dimensions of representation, as they pertain to the construction of the people. Overall, this study enables new paths of research on the topic of populist representation.