Democracy has proven resilient to these populists advances.

The work of Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser has stressed that populism does not threaten democracy per se—that populism is a natural reaction by voters against some of the undemocratic qualities of liberal institutions. In this view, decisions on too many issues have been shifted from legislatures to judiciaries or bureaucracies, removing them from democratic deliberation by elected officials, and creating a sense that “there is no alternative” for certain policies. Scholars like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue further that populists can perform an important role in re-politicizing politics, making clear that policies do indeed create winners and losers, and these decisions on who wins and who loses should be made by elected rather than unelected bodies. The economist Dani Rodrik would argue that, in particular, international economic agreements and the bureaucratization they entail too often undermine democratic deliberation by limiting the policy options of future governments.Richard Katz and Peter Mair would add that mainstream parties for too long worked to prevent real political competition, raising barriers to entry for new parties through campaign finance and media laws that benefitted incumbents. This “cartelization” of political competition has produced parties that are often indistinguishable on policy, and lent credence to populist claims that mainstream parties are unresponsive to public preferences. These arguments suggest that by mobilizing new constituencies, populists can make democracy more representative, improving democratic deliberation and accountability.Few of these scholars would describe populism as an unmitigated boon to democracy, however. Jan-Werner Müller argues that populism’s illiberal elements are in fact threats to democracy. Populists frequently disregard the rights of individuals who are not considered “the people”—usually ethnic or sectarian minorities—as well as the checks on government power they believe stifle the “will of the people.”[vii] In this line of argument, such tendencies are anti-democratic by their nature because they lead populists to undermine key qualities necessary for democracy: civil liberties for all citizens to freely organize and express their political preferences, and independent state institutions that can guarantee fair competition between the government and opposition.In a similar vein, Larry Diamond has argued that populism can, at a minimum, threaten liberal democracies—those that uphold the highest democratic standards for protecting civil liberties—when populists reject the notion of pluralism and embrace cultural exclusion. Diamond suggests that, for the first time since the worldwide “Third Wave” of democratization began in the mid-1970s, there is a risk that advanced liberal democracies could break down, and illiberal populists could be the actors behind these reversions to autocracy.In practice, populist parties in he 21st Century have had no more success than mainstream parties in improving democratic deliberation. Populist parties in power have increased democracy’s representativeness, but undermined accountability when their lack of interest or aptitude for governance has shifted policymaking to actors outside the party, and populists’ policy failures in office can create continuing crises of accountability. Populists in power have frequently strengthened the power of the executive over the legislature while polarizing the electorate into exclusionary groups and coopting or suppressing civil society. And populists’ weakening of key checks on executive authority has been a common precursor to autocratic reversion—including in the wealthiest democracies to ever break down.