Campaigns and regimes: party characteristics, political transformations and the outcomes of populist governments

Comparative European Politics https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-022-00322-4 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Campaigns and regimes: party characteristics, political transformations and the outcomes of populist governments Francesco Campolongo1 · Francesco Maria Scanni1,2 Accepted: 5 October 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023 Abstract The growing success of populist parties in western democracies has generated lively academic debate surrounding the changes this populist wave has created in various political systems. These parties have demonstrated their ability to shift from protest to governing parties, consequently shifting experts’ attention toward the effects of populism in power on democratic institutions. In light of examples in South America and Easter Europe, scholarly debate has centered on concerns that populist governments will deform democracy and democratic institutions, limit institutions and reduce both checks and balances and pluralism. Here we argue that in the context of a consolidated western democracy, populist governments identify themselves with government ‘as usual’, and that the populist ascent produces a greater impact on the political system as a vehicle for protest than it does on institutions once in power. We analyze the three examples of populism represented by the 5 Star Movement, Podemos and La République En March in order to examine the transformations produced by their successes in their relative political systems and their various effects on institutions once in government. Keywords Populists · Government · Democracy · Decartelization · New parties * Francesco Campolongo Francesco Maria Scanni 1 University of Calabria, Political and Social Science Department, Via Pietro Bucci, 87036 Arcavacata, Rende, CS, Italy 2 University of Teramo, Political Science Department, Teramo, Italy Vol.:(0123456789) F. Campolongo, F. M. Scanni Introduction The 2008 economic crisis acted as a political catalyst, accelerating certain changes and expanding the scope of their effects. It was also echoed by a crisis of legitimacy among parties and traditional representatives. This twofold crisis, economic and of representative politics, formed the principal element of the causal framework for the historic break with bi-partitic or bipolar arrangements that occurred in many contexts. In Mediterranean Europe in particular, we witnessed a rapid decartelization of national political systems due to the ascendance of outsider parties such as Podemos, La République En March (LREM) and the 5 Star Movement (5SM). The combination of the economic crisis and the ineffective policies enacted by institutional actors in response provoked electorates into profound frustration with institutional politics and distrust of the political parties that had historically upheld those institutions. These parties then went through a crisis of social legitimacy in which they became less and less accepted as vectors of representation while facing increasingly hostile societies (Dalton et. al. 2011; Daalder 2002), and which challenged not only political actors but ultimately ended up tearing down both the mechanisms of mediation as well as the concept of representation itself (Bianchi and Raniolo 2017). In the resulting void of representation, voter disillusionment and distancing from the traditional social bases of historic parties reduced both electoral and political participation (visible as increased abstentionism and electoral volatility and reduced party membership, for example). New subjects (new parties) stepped into the gap, finding fertile ground for their vigorous critiques of the traditional political classes and channels of representation and championing a populistic vision of radical change to the existing party system as approached through a single discrediting lens (caste, political elite, old guard) specific to each context. These new parties’ use of aggressive discursive registers, verticalization, personalization and appeals to the people with the intent of monopolizing representation, was concerning to observing scholars, who saw populism as a threat to constitutional democracy and representative institutions (Martinelli 2013; Müller 2017). In this article, we undertake two main tasks: 1. To qualitatively analyze the characteristics of three of the many parties found under the populist umbrella; 2. To examine the effects of these subjects’ ascension to power on the political context and subsequently on democratic and institutional regime once in governments. The three case studies selected share a Euro-Mediterranean political context, have all been able to rapidly impose themselves upon the electoral landscape such that they have risen to government, and are new parties in the literal sense of genuinely new (Bartolini and Mair 1990, Sikk 2005), that is, parties that emerged ex novo and are not traceable to the fusion or schism of any pre-existing parties. The peculiarities of the French semi-presidential system allowed the rapid ascent of LREM to coincide with its leader’s conquest of the Presidency of the Republic, while in Campaigns and regimes: party characteristics, political… the Spanish and Italian contexts, the road to power was lengthened by the need to cement alliances with other political forces. For the first part of our analysis, we will compare the three parties in order to isolate and describe the populistic elements in their organizational, communications, rhetorical and ideological strategies as well as understand the instruments they employed in order to effectively attract the antitraditional party electorate. Then, we will investigate the effects their ascensions to power have had on the political systems and processes of decartelization, and lastly, we will attempt to either prove or disprove those hypotheses that maintain that populism in power is fundamentally a threat to democracy tout court (Pappas 2019; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Müller 2017), an illiberal political deviation (Zakaria 1997; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013), or an internal outlier (the outskirts, if you will, Arditi 2004) of democracy (or its most extreme version, Urbinati 2019). This final part of our analysis will be carried out using a quali-quantitative methodology aimed at examining the activities of government in order to determine their impact on institutions and democracy. Who are they? Three types of populism: parallels and distinctions Despite the ideological differences between LREM, Podemos and the 5SM, the three share many characteristics. In its first national election in 2013, the 5SM made history, becoming the primary Italian party with 8.7 million votes: never in the history of the Italian Republic (or in the rest of Europe) had a party managed such a result in their first election cycle. In the French case, Emmanuel Macron’s successful claim on his party’s leadership was certainly influenced by the semi-presidentialist political (...truncated)