Methods of Mapping Initiatives Opposing Populist Parties

This chapter presents a Typology of Initiatives Opposing Populist Parties, providing a conceptual framework for empirical analysis of responses to populist parties. On one dimension, the typology distinguishes between actors opposing populist parties, principally public authorities, political parties, and civil society actors. On another, it distinguishes between tolerant and intolerant modes of engagement with populist parties. This dimension develops a practice-based conception of tolerance and intolerance involving, respectively, the observation or suspension of rights, privileges, and respect which political parties would usually enjoy, either by law or in practice, because of their representative role in a democratic society and/or as a governing party in the international sphere. The chapter additionally outlines methods used to collect data on opposition initiatives in seven country case studies discussed later in the book. In an approach inspired by protest event analysis and political claims analysis, qualitative content analysis of newspaper reports on opposition to populist parties was used to collect information on the prevalence of different types of opposition to populist parties. This data was used to both refine the typology, which was first developed using theoretical categories from the existing literature, and to observe patterns in opposition to the populist parties we studied.