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POLITIKON: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science                   Vol 51 (December 2021) 

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Populist Government and Constitutional Democracy: Radical 

Incompatibility or Possible Coexistence? 
 
Francesco Maria Scanni 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.51.4  

Francesco Maria Scanni is Ph.D in Politics, Culture and Development at 

the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of 

Calabria. He is the author of the monograph "Differenziazione 

territoriale e qualità della democrazia" Aracne, and his contributions 

have appeared in several international journals. His research 

interests lie in the field of political science and political theory. 

In particular, he works on populism, quality of democracy, political 

parties and voter analysis. Email: Francesco.scanni@unical.it. 

 

Abstract  

Until the first decade of the 21th century, scholars and reporters have identified contemporary 

populism as an element of anti-systemic revolt; furthermore, they have also recognized an 

incompatibility between populist phenomenon and government function. However, some recent 

cases of populist parties in power seem to be able to put into crisis more than one certainty 

regarding the nature and scope of the populist phenomenon. This observation raises the questions 

of this work: what harmful effects does populism in government produce on liberal institutions, 

pluralism, and representation in constitutional democracies? Do these effects merely erode the 

liberal component, or do they extend to produce a degeneration of democracy as a whole? And 

finally: what are the risks for democracy? The article corroborates the diarchic theories of 

democracy and aims to demonstrate the lack of compatibility between the principles of liberal 

democracy and populist principles, which have a negative impact not only on the liberal 

component, but also on the quality of democracy in its entirety. 

 

Keywords 

Populism; Government; Democracy; Liberalism; Representation 

  



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Introduction 

The relationship between populism and democracy is problematic. Although the two 

concepts have different elements in common, starting from the roots — Demos and Populus that 
refer to the same object (although, as we shall see, they do not express the same thing) — the two 
phenomena seem to be mutually exclusive: when democracy is healthy, populism shrinks; 

conversely, when the democratic system seems unable to provide adequate responses to the crises 

of the legitimacy of the actors that compose it, the populist push becomes impetuous. Populism, 

therefore, grasps the ontological gap that exists between ideal democracy and real democracy and 

inserts itself in the incessant struggle to make the abstract people and the concrete people coincide. 

Several scholars (among others see: Tӓnnsjӧ 1992; Kazin 1995; Canovan 1999; Arditi 2004; Laclau 
2005; Urbinati 2019) have underlined the ambivalent nature of the relationship between the two 

factors. The explicit connection between populism and democracy is the motor of what Nadia 

Urbinati has defined as “maximal theory of populism” (Urbinati 2019, 116-17), which offers not 

only a conception of it based on the characteristics consubstantial with the phenomenon 

(rhetorical style; Manichean division, ideological core) but extends to the analysis of the relations 

it promotes within the democratic system and the effects that populist government produces on 

liberal constitutional democracy.  

Examining the existing literature on the subject, there is no convergence line: some authors 

have described populism as an opportunity to relaunch the delegitimized democratic institutions 

(Taylor 2016), otherwise, the rest have spoken of populism as the purest form of democracy 

(Tӓnnsjӧ 1992) or as a counter-democratic demonstration that pushes the main actors of 
democracy to improve policies (Rosanvallon 2017a). Despite this, it is possible to find a majority 

tendency: that of the authors (Diamond 1999; Zakaria 1997; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012) who 

identify populism as a problem for constitutional democracy. My concern is the relationship 

between populism in government and democracy, i.e., examining whether the populists, from the 

government, negatively affect pluralism and liberal institutions (or, as Blokker 2018 argues, 

democratic constitutions) and how populists in power transform constitutional democracy. If 

these risks exist, which institutions, rules, practices, and actors do they address?  

This paper, using a methodology focused on conceptual analysis developed by comparing 

the various approaches and answers provided by various authors, aims to draw some theoretical 

coordinates on the relationship between populism in power and democracy. The purpose of the 

article is, therefore, to take into account the existing theories and provide some new 

conceptualizations useful to evaluate the relationship between populist principles and principles 

of modern liberal democracy, i.e. that system which guarantees individual freedoms, pluralism of 



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representation, free elections, respect for third party powers, and guarantee of minority (Sartori 

1987). In the first section, I retrace the main scholarly contributions focused on the theme of 

populists in government; the second section concentrates on the two main interpretations of the 

relationship between democracy and liberalism: the diarchic and the dualistic one. Furthermore, I 

examine the transformation of one of the pillars of modern liberal democracy that is the principle 

of representation and dwell on the essential characteristics of populist democracy as a 

disfigurement of the principles and norms of the democratic system. Finally, I underline the risks 

of this transformation. There are several limits to an analysis of this kind: some generalizations 

could be contradicted by empirical observations and the absence of non-Western perspectives 

could negatively affect the completeness of the conclusions. Despite these weaknesses, a 

comprehensive theoretical framework could guide future empirical studies and will be specifically 

useful for scholars approaching the topic of populism in power with greater awareness of the 

salient issues that are at the center of the debate. 

Theories of the Populists in Power 

Until recently, contemporary populism has been interpreted as an “element of anti-

systemic revolt” (Falter and Schuhmann 1993; Schedler 1996; Tismaneanu 2000; Engler, et al. 

2019), that is, it has been postulated that between the populist phenomenon and the function of 

government there is a high degree of incompatibility and that populism is a charismatic 

phenomenon and therefore difficult to institutionalize. This trade-off would entail the inability of 

populists to reach power or, even when they succeed in doing so, to manage the institutions of 

democratic politics. However, some recent cases of new populist parties, such as the Five Star 

Movement, Podemos, Syriza, or of parties whose leadership has been renewed in a populist sense (such 

as the Trump-led conservative party, the Renzian-led PD, and Salvini's League) who came to the 

government, seem to be able to undermine more than one conviction concerning the nature and 

scope of the populist phenomenon, outlining an unprecedented “institutional populism”. As 

challengers, populist parties have shown, in various countries, that they can carry out a real rise to 

power, an element that, starting from 2008, required greater attention to the behavior of populist 

actors once came to power, as well as towards the potential effects that these actors could produce 

on democratic and liberal institutions with government action. The populist parties in power no 

longer seem to be confined to some countries of the world with an underdeveloped economy but 

have become a impetuous phenomenon that challenges even the advanced democracies of the 

developed world from within. 

Despite reaching prominent positions in different countries, populist parties for several 

reasons face challenges on their journey to the government. Firstly, their programs are designed 



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to attract the widest possible part of the heterogeneous audience of discontent, by channeling 

disparate claims within them. Secondly, to acquire increasing shares of trust from the opposition 

and undermine the political system, populist parties often propose overpromising programs (Mény 

and Surel 2000; Aslanidis 2017) that amplify the direct and indirect costs of their potential 

implementation. Another central problem can be found in the strong deiodination (Tormey 2018) 

towards other political actors (channeled above all towards the mainstream parties), and in the 

codes of political relations based on one's moral superiority, elements that make the formation of 

governments of a post-electoral coalition. Finally, the most difficult element to reconcile is the 

anti-elitist rhetoric and political identity defined by contrast and opposition (Laclau 2005), which 

loses its position with the passage from the opposition to the government. 

Against this backdrop, Morlino and Raniolo (2018, 140) pointed out the dilemmas of 

populist parties in the transition from opposition to government: a) the strategic one that refers to 

the choice between short-term and long-term responsiveness (or, to use a distinction proposed by 

Sartori (1967), between personal responsibility, influenced by the political/electoral cycle, and 

functional responsibility, based instead on the realization of long-term interests taking into account 

systemic constraints); b) that of identity, which refers to the preference between economic and 

political responsiveness; c) the divergence between the aims declared in the electoral campaign and 

the concrete possibility of realizing the operational aims, that is the tension between the radicalism 

of the discourse (political propaganda) and the moderation of government practice (political 

action); d) the organizational one that derives from the constraints deriving from the transition 

light, post-bureaucratic and network-based on organizational models to institutionalization; e) the 

difference between anti-establishment propaganda that has a unifying effect when they are in 

opposition and the need to make specific decisions that have exclusive effects when they are in 

government; f) the absence of a professional political class, and the consequent need to rely on 

the old bureaucratic staff often in close relationship and continuity with the previous leaders 

(Morlino and Raniolo 2018, 181-82); g) having to deal with the spontaneous centralistic tendency 

of the national government that collides with their peripheral representation. 

According to some studies, the populist parties in power would follow the same dynamics 

as the other radical parties, reaching a growing political maturity following their entry into the 

institutions which would produce a normalizing effect on them. Peter Mair (2016) argued that in 

the transition from opposition to the government, populists try — at least strategically — to 
moderate their excesses to build an image of salonfähig, that is of “respectable ones” (Morlino and 

Raniolo 2018, 52). Berman (2008) traced this dynamic back to the phase of approaching 

government, that is, to attempts to build political links with other actors to form potential 



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government coalitions. Similarly, according to Krause and Wagner (2019), a responsible and 

pragmatic approach takes over when these parties are called upon to demonstrate the ability to 

manage and resolve problems concerning public affairs, thus gaining credibility through acting. 

The transition from protest to institutional representation (with the consequent increase in 

institutional relevance) and, even more so, from opposition to the government (which involves a 

prior search for offices) could therefore lead to the reduction of the anti-establishment position 

and favor an adaptation behavioral to parliamentary procedures and customs (Akkerman et al. 

2016), or remodeling of the character and intensity of their rhetoric. Ivaldi (2016) spoke in this 

regard of the external packaging of the message. Other authors, instead, have argued that, by the 

commitment of these parties to appear reliable in the eyes of public opinion and other parties, the 

transformation could even extend beyond the communication style and behavior to transform 

even ideology and the content of programs and positions (Heinisch 2003).  

An opposite line of thinking is that which sees populism as the potential for the creation 

of a new post-democratic or alter-democratic regime, and a specific type of government in the 

populists in power. A contrary line of thought (Müller 2017; Pappas 2019; Levitsky and Ziblatt 

2019) is the one that sees in populism the potential for the creation of a new post-democratic or 

alter-democratic regime, and in populists in power a specific type of government. Takis Pappas 

(2019) identified the following elements to isolate some characteristics of “populism in office”: a) 

the strengthening of an extraordinary leadership compared to an ordinary / legal-bureaucratic one 

in the Weberian sense (charismatic leadership); b) the relentless strategic search for political 

polarization. In this case, however, it is a question of competitive polarization without ideological 

polarization (political polarization); c)the adoption of a political program based on the hoarding 

of the main State institutions, on the strengthening of the executive and the consequent weakening 

of liberal check and balances and the imposition of illiberal constitutions (institutional onslaught); 

d) the strategic use of patronage tools, aimed at rewarding their supporters at the expense of the 

opposition and their supporters (patronage politics), is also useful as a rooting strategy. 

According to Müller (2017), through the argument that they are the only morally 

legitimized representatives of the people, populists justify three main ways of managing power: a 

sort of colonization of the state; mass cronyism, also called “discriminatory legalism” and the 

systemic repression of civil society. Blokker (2013) argues that, in some cases, populism to reify 

the principle of majority in majority power (see the distinction between majority principle and 

majority rule that we owe to Sartori, 2007) could cross the distinction between ordinary legislative 

activity and constitutional, giving rise to a series of constitutional reforms indicated under the 

name of populist constitutionalism. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt (2019), whose work focuses 



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particularly on the experience of the Trump government, the modern populist government would 

be characterized by the production of a slow democratic decalage organized in two phases: initially, 

a legal (and nonviolent) subversion of conventional rules of behavior and political habits, and 

subsequently the implementation of structural changes to liberal institutions and even to the 

Constitutional Charters aimed at creating a new system of authority. 

Undemocratic or Illiberal? The Dilemma of the Populists in Government 

Within the theories that describe populism in terms of risk to democracy, it is possible to 

distinguish two approaches. The first is the one that theorizes the possibility of a theoretical 

disjunction between democracy and liberalism and sees in populism a phenomenon that negatively 

impacts liberal values: norms, procedures, inter-institutional accountability, and therefore respect 

for the balance of powers and principles of constitutionalism. To understand the theoretical basis 

of the distinction between the two traditions, we can take up the words of a staunch supporter of 

left populism, Chantal Mouffe (2000, 2-3), who maintained: “On one hand we have the liberal 

tradition constituted by the reign of law, from the defense of human rights and respect for 

individual freedom; on the other hand, the democratic tradition, whose main ideas are those of 

equality, of the identity between rulers and the governed and of popular sovereignty. There is no 

necessary articulation between these two different traditions, but only a contingent historical 

articulation”. According to this binary distinction, populism in power would give life, not to a new 

political regime, but the transformation of the form of state: from liberal democracy one would 

pass to illiberal/populist democracy, characterized by the ontological and irreducible opposition 

between the neat people represented by its leader and the corrupt elite; by the dominance of direct 

popular expression - filtered by the conviction of the leader or the party – on the law and by the 

replacement of party representation with a type of direct bond between leader and electorate 

(Urbinati 2019).  

Already Robert Dahl, in 1956, proposed a distinction between the Madisonian form and 

the populist form of democracy. While in the first version, the emphasis is placed on the limitations 

of the power of government and of democratic power itself, populist democracy accentuates the 

antagonism with the liberal principle of limitation to theorize the potential limitlessness of the 

power of the people. Yasha Mounk (2018) took up this distinction - redefining the terms, 

respectively, the Madisonian form and the Rousseauian form of democracy - to advance a 

comparison between two excluding models: democracy without rights (which would coincide with 

populist democracy) and rights without democracy (what the author calls undemocratic liberalism 

which characterizes, for example, the new European governance with the growing importance of 

non-majoritarian institutions). The various theorists of democratic dualism (Zakaria 1997; 



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Diamond 1999; Mudde 2004; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012) therefore distinguished between 

democracy and liberal-democracy, defining the latter not as the only possible form of democracy, 

but only as one of the possible combinations. Fared Zakaria (1997) was the first to use the 

expression “illiberal democracy” to indicate regimes in which there is a combination of free 

elections and authoritarianism, in which the rulers “are democratically elected (only to ignore) the 

limits imposed on their power from the constitution (and depriving) citizens of fundamental 

rights” (Zakaria 1997, 111). It could be said, in summary, that populist leaders accept electoral 

democracy but not liberal constraints (Sartori 1987) on the exercise of political power: “If 

liberalism is a culture of delimitation and control of political power, the populist leaders who have 

emerged in recent years are knowingly anti-liberal or illiberal. They use their electoral legitimacy to 

question the liberal constraints of the rule of law” (Fabbrini, preface to Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, 

X). 

The second approach offers a different reading of modern democracies and consequently 

a different diagnosis of the effects that government populism has on the democratic system. One 

of the first authors to question the classic contrast between populist democracy and liberal 

democracy was Margaret Canovan (1999), who rejected the theories of total separation between 

the two terms and defined the liberal component as the mechanism that preserves the democratic 

system from prevarication by the tyranny of the majority (Baldini 2014). Liberalism, therefore, 

would not be one of the many sets of values that can accompany democracy, but the one that 

makes it possible in its complete form. Modern democracies, according to Canovan, are 

characterized by a “double face”, by a constant tension between the redemptive face and the 

pragmatic face. As Baldini summarizes (2014, 12) “The two faces should not be seen as 

superimposable on the alternative liberalism/populism: in every country, politics alternates these 

phases, and populist waves present themselves as one of the clearest symptoms of the prevalence 

of redemptive face”. Therefore, according to Baldini (2014), there is no crystallized gap between 

the two moments, the popular one and the constitutional one, but there is a continuous tension in 

which an interpenetration alternates followed by an imbalance, and vice versa an imbalance 

followed by a rebalancing. More clearly, Müller (2017) underlined the subversive and undemocratic 

potential that lies within the conceptual core of populism, the distinctive elements of which would 

produce a democratic disfigurement and the affirmation of an undemocratic principle of 

democracy. The interpretation offered by Müller (2017) is the following: the rights of freedom of 

speech and assembly, pluralism and freedom of expression of the mass media, the protection of 

minorities, are not only values that fall within the sphere of competence of liberalism, but have to 

do with democracy itself. The rule of law and democracy are intertwined, and you can't have one 



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without the other. The populist refusal of the delimitation of power, argues the author, is not 

reduced only to a formal element but ends up by affecting the democratic substance itself, because 

the same imbalance between the rule of the majority and the rule of law in favor of the former 

produces a loss of importance of minority rights and the guarantee of a balance of powers, 

undermining the very democratic substance itself. 

Recently, Nadia Urbinati (2019) examined in depth the relationship between populism and 

democracy and the potential outcomes that populism can produce when it governs. Urbinati 

(2019) found a tendency to distort the procedures (and, hence, the substance) of democracy in 

radical majoritarianism and in the effort to tolerate divisions of powers, an independent judiciary, 

and the statute of fundamental rights. In controversy with the theorists of democratic dualism, she 

argued that democracy cannot be reduced to the recurrence of electoral practices. The liberal 

components, such as the limitation of power, the existence of checks and balances, free 

information, guaranteed civil liberties, and legitimate multi-partism must be also considered 

integral characteristics of democracy, both in its procedures and its substance. Moreover, it is 

precisely the institutional brakes and counterweights that are classified by the populists as obstacles 

that prevent the unfolding of the pure will of the people — one synthesized by a leader who 
embodies it. If we define democracy as that system that guarantees “the protection of fundamental 

civil and political rights by limiting the power of the governing majority” through pluralism, the 

separation of powers, and the independence of the judicial system (Urbinati 2019, 16), populism 

according to the author, seems to transform this three pillars of modern constitutional democracy 

through three factors: the direct relationship between the leader and the part — considered just — 
of the people, the supreme authority of the audience and public opinion (Manin 2014), and the 

intolerance shown towards opponents and democratic impediments. 

Populism and Representation: the “Inner Periphery” of Democracy 

A point that partially unites these analyses, and that differentiates them from others that 

identify the populist government with a post-democratic government or as a prodromal step 

towards the establishment of an authoritarian system (we have seen Pappas 2019; see also Kellner 

2016), is that both do not identify the populists in power with a leak from democracy, but as an 

extreme limit or as an “internal periphery” (Arditi 2004) of democracy. The populist challenge, 

therefore, is not aimed at replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, but aims at 

establishing a direct representation of the people by the leader, translating the popular mandate 

into a plebiscitary sense. As for the theme of the transformation of representation, populism would 

distance itself from the principle of acting for (Pitkin 1967) to address itself not towards direct 

democracy, but towards a “democracy of incarnation” (Zanatta 2004) in which the direct link is 



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that between people and party/leader. As in private law, direct representation promoted by 

populists differs from indirect representation based on the action of the representative which takes 

place not only “on behalf” but also “in the name” of the person represented. Acting “in the name” 

as well as “on behalf” is one of the many stratagems used by populists to facilitate identification 

between them and the evoked people and suspend the latter's judgment of their activity. Taking 

up the expression of Decker (2003, quoted in Giraudi 2017, 124-25): “Populism postulates that 

the classic intermediary institution should be eliminated and replaced by a direct link between the 

government and the electorate”. 

According to these theories, populism in government disfigures democracy through 

incremental “process innovations” (Schumpeter 1943) which unbalance institutional mechanisms 

and introduce new limit-tensions that alter institutional functioning and produce a subversion of 

the indices of the quality of democracy. According to Morlino and Raniolo (2018) the populist 

challenge intertwines with other critical factors both external (economic crises, international crises, 

migratory flows) and internal (corruption, decline of traditional channels of representation, lack of 

alternation, and dissatisfaction with the activities of governments) and hence puts democratic 

regimes under pressure. In fact, “The impact of the populist challenge [...) extends to all the main 

dimensions of democratic quality, even if not all the relevant dimensions and their secondary 

dimensions they are involved in the same way and with the same intensity. The result of the 

populist challenge can be a subversion of democratic quality, rather than the improvement or 

deepening of democracy” (Morlino and Raniolo 2018, 178). Populist democracy is identified with 

a precise form of democracy that is based on a specific type of representation, which however is 

characterized by some limit-tensions which, contrary to the expressed intent to achieve democracy 

at its best, obtain democracy at its worst. As stated by Weyland (2013), the populists in the 

government direct formulas that promote political disintermediation and simultaneously require a 

plebiscitary approval, making democracy no longer radically democratic but less democratic. 

Modern democracy is based on the irreducible and necessary gap between the immediate 

will of the various popular sectors and the - mediated - political translation of the demands from 

below. This void, in a constitutional democracy, can be partially filled thanks to two mechanisms. 

Firstly, the fictio juris of the majority as unanimity, which presents itself as the guarantor of the 

interests of all, also in light of the acceptance of the result by the opposition. Secondly, the constant 

work of representation and mediation carried out by the parties reduces the distance between the 

institutions and the portions of the people they represent, between inside and outside. In this way, 

representative democracy, which unlike direct democracy does not collapse the moment of will 

and judgment in the very act of elections (or of the decision through deliberation arising from a 



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direct consultation), keeps the political process open. Populism, for its part, proposes a new mixed 

regime characterized by the oxymoronic formula of direct representation (Urbinati 2019). In other 

words, there is a substitution of representation through parties with the incarnation of the part of 

the people deemed worthy by the leader. The direct component of populist parties, therefore, does 

not refer so much to the modalities of decision-making but the disintermediated relationship 

between the leader and his people. The aim is to obtain a “full” that resolves the original defect 

affecting representation, consisting of the distance between the political principle and sociological 

reality (Rosanvallon 2006). 

The consequence of this interpretation of political authority which he believes he has based 

on popular legitimacy is that “with him, the evocative power of the incarnation prevails over the 

rationalized principle of representation” (Diamanti and Lazar 2018, 28). While according to 

classical democratic theory (Kelsen 1981; Dahl 1956; Sartori 1967) this distance makes it possible 

to maintain the political space as a field that is always open to the reformulation of preferences, 

the populists demand - through instruments that reinforce the idea of a perfect coincidence 

between the univocal popular will and populist representation — to seal it definitively. Here lies 
the forcing of constitutional democracy to its extreme limit: populism does not inaugurate a new 

type of political regime but transforms the democratic system it uses to assert itself by presenting 

itself as an actor provided with a higher moral legitimacy than that of its competitors (united, in a 

single frame of discredit, under the discrediting label of elite or establishment), guilty of disfiguring 

the moral and political integrity of the one-people (Tronconi 2018). Therefore, it does not escape 

from representative democracy but transmutes its essence, verticalizing it; that is, replacing 

representation through parties with the incarnation of the part of the people deemed “deserving” 

by the leader. 

The interpretation of populism as a new type of representative government starts from the 

diarchic conception of democracy (Canovan 1999), Which is based on the idea of democracy as a 

mixed government of decision (i.e., political will and from which the decision-making process 

originates) and opinion (the sphere of extra-institutional political judgments). The aversion 

towards the culture of delimitation and control of political power, the change in the tenor of the 

institutional discourse, the continuous inter-institutional tensions, and the modification of 

behavioral, regulatory codes and consolidated traditional practices do not only produce a 

disfiguring impact on liberal institutions and do not damage only the liberal system, but also deeply 

affect the democratic system itself in its broad conception, producing a democracy of low quality 

(or, as Ardeni (2020, 67) defined it, a “form degraded of democracy”). But paradoxically, by 

limiting themselves to contesting the traditional actors and forms of representation, by not 



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extending the critique of the legitimacy of the regime itself, and by not proposing to radically 

change the system of government, the populists manage to present themselves as the only 

interpreters of the popular will and therefore as the only authentic democrats who oppose the 

factions and the privileged castes who hold, officially or secretly, the power, and intend to win 

power legally. 

Also in this case, however, there is an element of friction to underline. Populists tend to 

conceive the electoral process as revealing a truth that already exists (Revelli 2018) and to consider 

themselves not a majority among the many possible, but the only just majority. By doing so, they 

drift away from sociological reality as a source of legitimacy (descriptive representation) to arrive 

at a type of symbolic representation, aimed at overcoming the interests’ part out to identify 

elements that transcend divisions and place the accent on concepts capable of uniting the social 

body. The populist challenge, therefore, fits into the ontological gap left empty by representation 

and takes advantage of the distance that separates representatives from represented. In that sense 

too, populism emphasizes the ideological and principled distance from the liberal tradition. Hans 

Kelsen (1981) argued in fact that the correspondence between the parliamentary majority and the 

popular will was impossible, a metapolitical illusion just like the identification of a precise popular 

will. People can never be grasped in its entirety; the identification of a single popular will is an act 

of pure fantasy (Achen and Bartels 2017). Furthermore, while liberal democracy, particularly in the 

light of recent war conflicts, aimed to fragment power and distribute it among non-elected 

institutions (constitutional courts, tribunals, etc.), placed above electoral responsibility, to prevent 

recurrence of the risk of tyranny of the majority, populism interrupts this tradition and tries to re-

aggregate the lost power. This interpretation of political competition and government activity can 

therefore lead populism to clash with constitutional democracy, even if its fundamental principles 

are incorporated into the democratic universe. In summary, when the principles that populism 

presents are translated into acts of government — and even more so when the interpretation of 
them exasperates them — they can collide with the principles of constitutional democracy. 

From Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde: A Variant of Democracy 

From what has been said so far, populism in power seems to establish a specific form of 

democracy, which differs from classical constitutional democracy to bring some transformations 

to democratic practices and substance while not escaping the system. Like the figure of Mr. Hyde 

in Stevenson-s novel, populist democracy appears to be the alter-ego of liberal democracy. 

Populism, therefore, has a democratic derivation that acts as a genetic relationship: if it were to 

escape from the democratic order, it would renounce most of its founding principles (primarily 

horizontality and free consultation) and would turn into authoritarianism. For this reason, 



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populism is described in terms of a particular interpretation of democracy, mainly centered on one 

of the elements that characterize modern democracy (the principle of popular sovereignty), which 

becomes overwhelming for the other principles and traditional institutional forms. According to 

Mastropaolo (2005), the problematic aspect concerns the relations with democracy in speeches 

and the practice of government in the light of the contempt for minorities, for the opposition, for 

the diversity of ideas, disregard for human rights, and intolerance towards the pluralism that 

populism manifests from the government. It is a “democratic fundamentalism” on which 

populism relies, which gives democracy a plebiscitary twist and empties it (Mastropaolo 2005, 76): 

when the populist parties win the elections and consider it a pronouncement of the people in their 

unity, and on these assumptions, they question the caution and uncertainty of the democratic 

regime, erode some fundamental principles at the basis of constitutional democracy.  

The myth of immediate democracy, in which the space - which allows the “distance” 

essential for elaboration and judgment - between the people and the leader is cancelled, 

substantially alters real democracy. The loss of distance in the name of identity and co-presence 

between leaders and voters has the aim of suspending judgment on the quality of the 

representation, the decisions taken and the policies promoted in defense of specific interests. Since 

according to the populists all power emanates from the people and condenses in the figure of the 

leader who exercises it in their name, the discretionary space of it extends beyond measure, 

overwhelming the powers that do not depend directly on the judgment or the will of the people 

and the leader. The delegation is therefore rejected by the populists both in its principles (since 

any mediation would distort the integral and already formed will of the people) as in its effects 

(when it, favoring the creation of a political elite, represents the origin of every evil of 

contemporary democracy, the failures to which are all attributed to the degeneration of political 

elites). In the very construction of the people, then, the populist version of democracy challenges 

proceduralism and produces a distortion of the principle of democratic representation. The same 

people to which populism is addressed is not the result of the political/theoretical construction 

promoted by social actors based on a specific vision of the conflicts that cross society, but is a pre-

existing monolithic entity, which is built outside - and against - a political practice traditionally 

understood and recognizes itself as a unitary subject. With Blokker (as cited in Anselmi et al. 2018, 

54) we could argue that with populism “the people are made identical to a populist, self-built 

majority”. However, the identification of the people “once and for all”, as well as the theorization 

of oneself as the only authentic and deserving representatives of it, is profoundly incompatible 

with the principle that informs the democratic space, which, to use the expression of Pierre 

Rosanvallon (2006, 83-84): “it always allows us to reopen and even put the question of the people 



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in completely new terms (...) in this sense, it could also be said that democracy suffers from a 

permanent crisis of representation”. 

The populists, on the other hand, tend to propose an overlap between their enemies and 

enemies of the whole people, as well as the indisputable equivalence between the reforms they 

propose and the popular will. To question an action by the populist government is to question the 

will of the people. This is the main method that populists in power use to justify their decisions 

and it is precisely the logic that distinguishes the populists from other parties critical of the liberal 

system: the other party is decreed to be non-part of popular sovereignty, an illegitimate part and 

morally unworthy to govern. The coincidence between popular will and government activity 

distinguishes the populist governmental form from that of representative democracy: in the 

second, in fact, “the people” can appear only in an institutionalized way, that is, as a majority in 

Parliament, while for populism the majority coincides with the integral people, therefore it is 

possible to speak in their name. Representative democracy not only considers the fallibility of the 

decisions taken by the rulers but is willing to question the conformity of the will of the 

representatives concerning the political translation expressed in the form of a decision by the 

rulers, for which it accepts its contestability. For the populists, on the other hand, the general will 

they appeal to is an abstract will, not empirically verifiable; a sort of Jacobin claim for the 

protection of a natural right independent of the actual will of the people. What populists consider 

the popular will is predetermined: its direction is not formed through the mediation between 

opposing heterogeneous wills nor does it derive from the inter-party political dialectic that occurs 

within the institutions of representation. The law loses its sovereignty in the presence of the general 

will that immediately manifests itself and unfolds all its hubris, refusing to control or limit.  

These acts and attitudes of the governing populists have become evident in several more 

or less mature democracies of Europe and even in the archetype of Democracy: the USA. In the 

“Imperfect democracies” (see Democracy Index) of Eastern Europe these attacks have gone to 

the extreme, reaching a compromise with the weak resistance of non-majoritarian institutions. In 

Hungary, for instance, President Viktor Orbán has fostered ongoing institutional tensions by 

denouncing the judiciary and other independent agencies, creating a “constitutional blitzkrieg” that 

weakens the separation of powers. Kaczyński in Poland has made consistent attacks on the 

Constitutional Tribunal and purged the Supreme Court by compelling rules on the designation of 

judges. Former Prime Minister Fico and his Smer managed to fill the Slovak Constitutional Court 

with loyal judges, de facto immunizing the Smer’s policies from judicial control. Likewise in the 

Czech Republic, Prime Minister Babiš has envisioned a series of measures that decrease checks on 

the executive and weaken the separation of powers; he has also attempted to weaken Parliament 



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 68 

(by abolishing the upper house and reducing the number of MPs in the lower house) to encourage 

greater centralization of power, with the support of President Miloš Zeman. In Western mature 

democracies, however, these attempts have often been controlled by guarantee institutions and 

have been reduced to a “war of words” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2019). In the Italian example, for 

instance, the threats of filing magistrates guilty of rejecting the orders of the Minister of the Interior 

addressed by Salvini to the courts and magistrates who opposed his decisions on landings and 

migrant control are paradigmatic. Even in the USA, Donald Trump has launched a heavy 

institutional game by pushing his presidential prerogatives to the limit and violating established 

practices through the appointment of two judges of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) (Hawkins 

et al. 2019). 

In light of these assessments, we could affirm that modern populist parties distort the 

institutional rules of the State and rewrite the geometry of the powers within the state. In other 

words, they offer a peculiar interpretation of democracy interpreting the tension between the two 

poles as an antinomy between two incompatible principles: the liberal one which intends to weaken 

popular power and its discretion, and the democratic one which they interpret as a boundless 

increase in the power of the sovereign people. By merging democracy and representation, it 

establishes a form of democracy that is based on a direct relationship between the leader and the 

people and on the celebration of a subset of the people that fundamentally disfigures, without 

formally denying them, democratic principles. It is in this sense that Nadia Urbinati (2014) speaks 

of “disfigured democracy”: a conception of politics that introduces a fierce but internal tension 

and contestation to democracy stretches some principles, and unravels some rules of the 

democratic regime while continuing to formally operate in it. It is therefore an internal 

transformation of democracy that, however, facilitates the risk of authoritarian drift. In populism, 

the primacy of the interests of the majority overshadows the liberal guarantee of the rights of 

minorities and the balance of powers. Hence the rejection of the legitimacy of those inherited rules 

and therefore not directly approved by the people: only popular ratification puts the seal on a 

decision. Such an interpretation of the subject holding the decision-making legitimacy produces a 

distortion of the role of Parliament and lays the foundations for a general rethinking of the 

delegation: it shows a preference for direct democracy instruments or for monitoring instruments 

of popular will. Citizens’ preferences are translated into political measures which, precisely because 

they are in line with the wishes of the people, Parliament must limit itself to ratifying. For instance, 

the 5 Star Movement promoted a series of institutional reforms from the government that, in 

addition to lowering the quorum for the validation of popular bills, erected the propositional 

referendum to a primary legislative source, binding the parliament to decide based on the 



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indications provided by the outcome of the consultation. This risked an extra-parliamentarisation 

of decision-making and a transformation of the formal architecture of powers that the 

Constitution designs.   

Modern representative democracy assumes and cultivates the constant tension between 

the functional principle and the plebiscitary principle (Bendix 1964), and tries to propose a 

decision-making synthesis that safeguards the division of constitutional powers (legislative, 

executive, and judicial power). In this dialectic, the formal abstraction of some principles 

subtracted from the discretion of the expression of the will of the majority is realized, which 

therefore limit it and act as a barrier to the potential drifts of arbitrary power, and the substantial 

dependence of the decision on the source of the will of the majority verified through the electoral 

mechanism. But this dualism is never transparent, for the fact that the immediate will of the people 

must always be contaminated with the democratic principles of the protection of minorities, 

pluralism, and the fundamental freedoms of the individual. We are within the concept of 

democracy as an empty and unbridgeable space, if not partially and using substitutes, proposed by 

Lefort (1986). The indeterminacy of democracy depends on the impossibility of identifying once 

and for all the main agent of sovereign legitimacy: the people. Populism tries to escape the 

necessary distance between pure will and representation, solidifying and absolutizing the concept 

of people which, instead, in the liberal-democratic conception remains mediated, open to re-

identification, and never definitive. The means that populism uses, however, derive from the 

conception of popular involvement as individual involvement, without a previous work of the 

parties that organizes it in a stable and continuous form. The use of these means by a populist 

party, responds to the intention to unite inside and outside and overlap the moment of decision 

and that of opinion and risks to violate the need for the democratic game to always remain open, 

also through the self-limitation of government forces. This attempt can have the effect of 

compromising the indirect and representative form of democratic government in which distance 

and difference are regulated by representation and elections.  

Conclusions: Sand in the Gears 

 Although it is possible to find empirical confirmation of the theories according to which 

populism in power does not establish a regime on its own and therefore does not change the 

democratic regime, its style of government changes the tenor of public discourse and the nature 

of relations between citizens and institutions. It is characterized by unscrupulous management of 

power that risks changing both the style and the content of public discourse, even when the 

Constitution does not change. Government populism when it does not deny the modern 

constitutional order tout court (favoring alternative constitutional projects supported by “legal 



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 70 

skepticism” or “legal resentment” (Blokker 2003), establishes an opportunistic relationship with 

constitutionalism and instrumental, often by reforming or ab-using existing constitutional 

structures. In power, populists establish a problematic relationship with constitutionalism as an 

expression of the legal-liberal doctrine. Blokker (cited in Anselmi et al. 2018, 50) argues, re-reading 

Corrias (2016), that populist constitutionalism can be linked to the distortion of the tradition of 

radical constitutionalism, in which the constituent power of the people is understood in an 

absolute sense, and by affirming the superiority of politics over the law it insists on refounding the 

political system negating the liberal limitations that have the function of “taming politics” (Corrias 

2016, 15). By arguing that the rule of law and constitutionalism cannot be superior to the will of 

the people, constitutionalism for the populists in power “becomes [...) a tool for the populist 

project to rebuild the state and redefine the relationship between politics and law” (Blokker 2003, 

51). But at the same time, this construction denies the emancipatory promise of constitutionalism 

addressed to all the forces that make up the political/constitutional body of the state, excluding 

those social and political realities that are not considered by populists as being included in their 

delimitation of the concept of people.  

Although we can trace this line of orientation common to the various populist 

governments, it must be recognized that not all the actors defined as "populists" behave in the 

same way when they govern. The differences, even those minimal, could produce significant 

effects if we take into account the fact that some measures - institutional changes, ordinary laws, 

distributions of resources, regulations, and press campaigns - that seem legal and reasonable, for 

how they are sewn together they can give life to real “institutional monsters” (Raniolo 2019, 54). 

For this reason, the typological conception of populism, which distinguishes the different types of 

populism — in the plural (Canovan 1999; Sorice 2018) — rather than using a unitary concept of 
populism in the singular more account of the specific differences between different cases. A 

hypothesis that would require an important study of empirical confirmation, for example, could 

highlight that the risk of extra-democratic drift of the populist government is more accentuated in 

contexts in which the government is a single party led by a leader with monocratic powers, which 

hybridizes a populist approach with ideological elements marked by conservatism with a radical 

orientation (Jenne 2018). Another element to take into account would be the effect that these 

measures could have on the different democratic systems. In incomplete democracies, where 

legitimization of guarantee institutions is feeble and the culture of rights is not deeply rooted in 

public opinion, democratic backsliding should be more accentuated than in countries with mature 

democracies, where institutional respect and respect for fundamental rights have long since 

become part of the social culture.  



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In any case, the changes that populism introduces deeply affect the various indicators that 

constitute the indispensable elements for a “quality democracy” (Morlino 2003, 21). Populist 

democracy comes to be identified with a precise form of democracy that is characterized by certain 

limiting tensions that could produce a slide, through a gradual introduction of “sand in the gears” 

(Beck 2005, 375) that guarantee the proper functioning of the system, towards authoritarian forms 

of political management. In this case, those “sliding backward realized through the progressive 

marginalization of democratic processes and institution” (Raniolo 2019, 1) would therefore be 

favored, producing a democracy of low quality which over time may tend to transform itself into 

“other than itself”, favoring an authoritarian twist. The liberal components such as the limitation 

of power, the existence of checks and balances, free information, the guarantee of civil liberties, 

and the presence of other parties considered legitimate are inseparable both from form and from 

democratic substance. The imbalance towards some of the elements produced by the populists in 

government, the tension between the powers, and the extremization of some principles to the 

detriment of others represent a serious risk of slipping into a form of government in which the 

will of the people becomes refractory to institutional temperaments and can easily result in tyranny. 

 
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