Paper presented to the 33rd Economic Forum, Karpacz, Poland, 3-5 September 2024
Ladies and gentlemen, ‘a spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of populism’. So wrote Ernest Gellner and Ghita Ionescu in 1969. Populism has been part of the story of modern democracy since the late 19th century. If it’s an enemy of democracy then it’s an internal enemy, a fraternal enemy. It can be a danger to democracy, in two ways: when populist movements change the character of public debate; and when populist parties win a parliamentary majority in proportional representation voting systems. The immediate conditions for populism are twofold: sustained low growth, and sustained political corruption/stasis. One of these may be enough.
But there are two questions today, and the second is: is populism a solution to the problem of post-democracy? When this was posed I was not sure what was meant by it but then I reread Colin Crouch’s book Postdemocracy. Crouch says that today’s ‘liberal democracy’ has three features: political participation is limited to elections, there is extensive freedom for business lobbying, and there no intervention ‘in the capitalist economy’ (3). That means that there is little egalitarian policy-making; because of this, today’s liberal democracy is post-democracy. Why? Because historically, egalitarian policy only happened because the organized working-class was able to influence politics. Now it doesn’t. Ruling – Herrschaft – is carried out by ‘privileged elites’ (2004), or on their behalf.
That’s a standard old left argument. Like the one that says that Swedish social democracy happened because of the strength of the organised Swedish working class. I’m not so sure: French demographer Emmanuel Todd would say it worked for so long less because of egalitarianism than because of Swedish attitudes to authority (rooted in family structures); decision-making by elites is OK – so long as they are qualified, not privileged. A decision only gets called ‘undemocratic’ when it turns out to be bad (elected politicians in Sweden were not allowed, by law, to decide covid policy – all was in the hands of health experts, who were more libertarian than the politicians).
That Gellner and Ionescu quotation is from a conference one of whose themes was the way dictators in post-colonial states had abandoned the ideologies that brought them to power (often some version of Marxism), and were instead trying to create a direct connection between themselves and their people, so they could be man of the year every year.
That gives us our first two features of populism:
1) First, populism is not an ideology, more a political style, available to all politicians in a democracy; there is right wing, left wing and centrist populism. After the 2016 referendum in the UK, where 52% voted to leave the European Union, non-populist prime minister Theresa May said: ‘brexit is the will of the people’.
2) That gives us the second feature. Populism turns the most basic definition of democracy – ‘rule by the people’ – into a politics of identity. The populist’s ‘the people’ are not ‘all citizens’, or ‘everyone in a territory’ but those who fit specific criteria of belonging, usually defined in terms of some sort of authentic or historically deep homeland. Moreover, the populist does not try to hide the contradiction in this partisan idea of the people. As Donald Trump said, ‘the only important thing is unification of the people, because the other people don’t matter’.
3) Thirdly, the populist politician tells you that all your problems are the fault of someone else, usually a remote ‘elite’. For the first, rural, populists in 19th century America and Russia the remote elites were city bankers or public officials. Since then, with so many more areas of life in complex societies the object of policy-making, the ranks of ‘remote elites’ have grown. Today they include politicians, scientific experts, policy specialists, social workers, scientists, journalists, judges, even sociologists. Neutral professionals, perhaps, making decisions so we don’t have to, for the populist they are another interest group.
But the key to populism isn’t mere hostility to elites, complaints about which are common enough. Populists believe that there is an alliance between elites and people at the bottom of society, the undeserving poor, scroungers, shirkers, immigrants. Today’s elites at the top are bankers or tech specialists or simply those with a university degree; those at the bottom are the service class of immigrants who clean for them and look after their children. Both groups live together in the smartest cities – paying high rents or accepting overcrowded shared flats – while the hard working, real people stay in the neglected provinces, unable, by their own efforts, to make progress in their lives (this is what the Gilets Jaunes in France were about).
The populist wave in France or Germany or Britain does depend on contingent circumstances, but the possibility is always there, and not just for the reasons Crouch suggests. It is rooted in basic democratic paradoxes.
1) First, as de Tocqueville said in the 1840s: in a democracy ‘everyone has the right to participate, but few wish to do so’. Most people are too busy surviving to find time for politics, and can end up being ruled by the few who have it: men of private means. Political parties were supposed to solve that problem, allowing people from all backgrounds to become professional politicians, but already by 1913 Robert Michels had identified the iron law of oligarchy, parties reproducing themselves like aristocracies.
2) But second, a basic right in liberal democracies is the right not to participate, to be left alone (totalitarian regimes are ultra participatory). That’s OK only as long as people believe they can improve their lives by their own efforts without the help of structural change. Populists are quick to seize on these and other liberal ideas about human rights or the rule of law – the formal aspects of politics – and say that they mock the misery of those who are stuck. They in turn may be ready to sacrifice those rights for something else: social justice, or human dignity.
3) Then there is the paradox of political knowledge: the very procedures that make democracy attractive – discussion, consideration of alternative options – can make it difficult to understand. It’s complicated, and committees of experts make it appear more so. Populism is a revolt of the ignorant, of people who say politics should be understandable to everyone, including those who do not want to be well-informed.
4) Finally, in a democracy there are winners and losers, and either one set of policies triumphs over another, or there is a compromise; at any rate we can never know what the will of the people is. In first past the post systems like the UK’s a party may gain 35% of the votes yet a decisive parliamentary majority; proportional representation systems by contrast generally produce coalitions and compromises satisfying nobody. This is why populists like plebiscites and national referenda, because they produce a decision that is easily-understood [like ‘leave the EU’ – simple, no?] Populists always feel they have a chance of winning a referendum whereas they may feel they have none in the sophisticated ‘chatter’ of regular elections.
So much for populism as social movement, as rhetoric. What of its effect on democracy?
Firstly, some say that if liberal democracy is working properly, populists will never get that far, because their energies will be defused, or the pressure put on government by new disorganized interest groups – the left behind, the hard working excluded poor, the forgotten post-industrial working class – will be used to reinvigorate politics, to help post-democracy be… less post. However partisan your conception of the people is, the argument goes, in a democracy every government has to govern for everyone, and the trick is simply to take into account or hear the pain of as many groups as possible.
Yet recent years have suggested that liberal democracy is, as Crouch suggests, not robust enough to absorb these energies, and overtly populist parties have been gaining ground. So what do populists do when they get into government? We do have some indicators, because in three cases in recent years parties with a heavily populist agenda have not merely entered government but gained a parliamentary majority, and done so in precisely those proportional representation systems which are designed to produce coalition government, and the compromise and moderation that that requires.
The long-term stability of PR systems has always relied on no party gaining an overall majority, but there are two sorts of stability: the Federal Republic of Germany version, with two parties alternating the role of biggest single party, often with centrist liberals as a junior partner; and the Japanese/Italian version, where rapidly changing coalitions are presided over by one dominant party for decades. The second version ran out of steam in the 1990s, the German continues to work, just about. The German office for the protection of the constitution, and the constitutional court, are having to think about whether the AfD, the second largest party, should be banned as a threat to the constitution. It won’t happen to happen but there is a cautionary tale from Poland under PiS, Hungary under your man of the year 2015 Viktor Orban, and Erdogan’s Turkey. Now PiS and the AKP are regular political parties and not populist movements per se. Still, I suggest that when one of the things that explains the boldness, the uninhibited character of their policies after they gained a parliamentary majority was a basic populist belief, namely that they had not only defeated their political opponents but had also defeated the political system itself, a system designed to produce compromise, equivocation, and moderation (in Turkey the previous method of defeating the system was the military coup. In this sense Turkey under the AKP is a post-coup democracy). We don’t have to do that, they say, we are free, free to cut through institutional blockages, and act quickly on behalf of all who voted for us. We are not the citizens’ representatives but the people’s delegates, and no opposition is really legitimate.
I think that a populist parliamentary majority in a PR system is more likely to encourage such boldness than a regular parliamentary majority in a first past the post system like Britain’s (granted, Lord Hailsham in the 1970s famously called the UK system one of elective dictatorship) because in those systems government is cabinet government and parliament is not a means of government. Its task is to scrutinize, not to govern, which is why the leader of the second largest party – however small – is the called leader of the opposition, and why in principle every MP is a potential opponent of the government. That I would suggest acts as a restraining influence even on parties with large parliamentary majorities. Not so in a PR system.
Finally then, what of the populist style of government? It entails some or all of the following:
Firstly, removing the distinction between government and state: seeking to capture the state by placing loyalists in civil service positions, moving against the independence of courts, seeking to impose strict moral standards on the media; replacing the heads of publicly funded institutions like TV, radio, museums, galleries, or theatres – experts in their field – with placemen.
Secondly, anti-pluralism, and ‘discriminatory legalism’, including suppression of or interference in civil society organisations by insisting they all follow the same rules [the promotion of ‘family values’ is not populist in itself; the Hungarian ban on gender studies in universities is. The leftist version of this happened in Greece under PASOK in the 1980s: ‘there are no institutions, only the people’. So try to make all institutions reflect your version of what ‘the people’ is.
Thirdly, the maintenance in government of the organised resentment that brought them to power, so that failures of government policy are blamed on enemies of the people, either internal wreckers or foreign elites or both (Erdogan in Turkey – the Gulenists and ‘the interest rate lobby’). If populism here is a solution to the problem of Crouch’s post-democracy, namely lobbying, it is only because lobbying is replaced by patronage and clientelism.
Finally, populist politics may entail an unstable politics of time. Populist politicians wish to make strategic decisions quickly, without the obstacles presented by state bureaucracies, civil servants, and planning laws; on the other, populist leaders will always claim that ‘my work is not complete’, and indeed, because populism entails suspicion of institutions it promotes fantasies of personal leadership as the only way the popular will can be expressed. And because of that, when their leaders die, resign or disappear, the populism they espoused often disappears with them. Unless, perhaps, the leader has a twin brother.
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