Some recent work on populist conservative forces engaged in legal mobilization in Europe highlights the involvement of US-based conservative legal advocacy organizations and their European affiliates. These groups are linked to efforts to resist the integration of Europe and the power of the European courts to implement the projects of liberal, left-leaning pro-EU social forces. Little attention thus far has focused on the lawyers active in these advocacy groups, their ties to the American conservative legal movement and the transnational lawyer networks of which they are a part. This essay sketches an agenda for future research on the composition, operations, strategies and discourse of this complex constellation of conservative lawyers and their organizations.

The rise of populism concerns many political scientists and practitioners, yet the detection of its underlying language remains fragmentary. This paper aims to provide a reliable, valid, and scalable approach to measure populist rhetoric. For that purpose, we created an annotated dataset based on parliamentary speeches of the German Bundestag (2013–2021). Following the ideational definition of populism, we label moralizing references to “the virtuous people” or “the corrupt elite” as core dimensions of populist language. To identify, in addition, how the thin ideology of populism is “thickened,” we annotate how populist statements are attached to left-wing or right-wing host ideologies. We then train a transformer-based model (PopBERT) as a multilabel classifier to detect and quantify each dimension. A battery of validation checks reveals that the model has a strong predictive accuracy, provides high qualitative face validity, matches party rankings of expert surveys, and detects out-of-sample text snippets correctly. PopBERT enables dynamic analyses of how German-speaking politicians and parties use populist language as a strategic device. Furthermore, the annotator-level data may also be applied in cross-domain applications or to develop related classifiers.

This article contributes to the existing literature on the populist online communication of governments. We look at the role of the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter under the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the wider Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) during the peace process. We carried out a rhetorical analysis of the Twitter posts of four key AKP actors – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Yalçın Akdoğan, and Efkan Ala – between July 1, 2012 and November 1, 2015. First, we show that the AKP actors persistently label the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and in Syria as a threat to the national security of Turkey, reflected in their rhetoric toward the remilitarization and resecuritization of Turkey’s Kurdish question within and across its borders. Second, we argue that the AKP used the peace process and various persuasive communicative techniques not only to consolidate Kurdish electoral support, but also to reach its aim to remove the Kemalist military–bureaucratic tutelage in Turkey that was replaced with hyper-presidentialism under the strong personality cult of Erdoğan. Third, we argue that Erdoğan’s increased one-man power has been reflected in the AKP’s branding itself as the only viable choice for the Kurdish region’s stability, which has blocked more constructive dialogue toward a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish question.

In recent years, conservative governments and their civil society allies have undermined international women’s rights treaties and SOGI rights initiatives and challenged domestic rights protections. The articles in this special issue grapple with these trends by analysing the ideologies, discourses, and strategies of contemporary anti-feminism in global and comparative contexts. Several prominent patterns emerge: the core significance of social hierarchy and biological essentialism to anti-feminist conservative thought; the polarizing demonization of feminists by religious conservatives and populist nationalists; the appropriation of rights discourses and advocacy tactics by anti-feminist campaigns; and the strategic importance of law and legal language as a terrain of rights contestation. Taken together, this research suggests that anti-feminism is not incidental to reactionary anti-democratic politics, but instead a constitutive element of political movements that seek to naturalize inequality and legally enforce conformity with conservative social norms.

In this article, we explore the consequences of the increasing presence of both left- and right-wing populist parties in government, critically reflecting on the recent scholarship on the topic, underlining promising venues for future research and outlining a conceptual framework which constitutes the background of this special issue entitled ‘Populism in Power and its Consequences’. Our main contribution is empirical, since – by reflecting on the various articles hosted in the special issue – we assess the impact of populist parties in government on politics, polities and various policy domains. We also provide an account of potential moderating factors of the influence of populists in government, focus on different ideological underpinnings of types of populisms (left-wing and right-wing) and discuss their relevance. We conclude by identifying four possible scenarios for European populist parties in governments: radicalization, compromise and moderation, splintering, or loss.

Does the demand for more direct democracy by populist parties have any implications for their internal decision-making? To answer this question, a novel large-scale research project analyses the 2017 candidate selection of all Bundestag parties, including the populist Alternative for Germany. Some 1,334 individual nominations of seven parties are compared using quantitative indicators along three dimensions of intra-party democracy (IPD): competition between aspirants for candidacy, inclusion of members and nomination-related communication. It shows that the AfD is living up to its promise of practising grassroots democracy: in all results it ranks at the top by a wide margin. A new populist organizational model seems to have emerged following neither the classic hierarchical and leader-oriented mode of many other European right-wing populist parties nor the delegate assembly mode typical of German parties. Our further development of IPD concepts, newly elaborated measuring methods and surprising empirical evidence improve the understanding of democratic decision-making in populist parties.

For the past decade, populist left- and right-wing parties have been on the rise in Europe. Yet, there are only a few studies on the internal organizational dynamics of these parties. Drawing on a new and unique data from fieldwork observations and interviews with party members from the Alternative for Germany (AfD), this article examines the internal democratic mechanisms in policy formation. The AfD displays a high degree of internal participation – an important but contrasting addition to the comparative research on radical right parties, which fail to sustain a democratic internal organization and consistently adopt mechanisms to centralize power in the leadership. The findings from this field research suggest that populist parties may actually engage in meaningful intra-party democracy and internal deliberative practices to invigorate the connections between citizens and their party representatives.

Right-wing populists across Western democracies have markedly increased references to Christianity in recent years. While there is much debate about how and why they have done so, less attention has been paid to how Christian communities react to this development. The present study addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of Christian responses to right-wing populist politics in Germany, France and the US. It relies on quantitative studies, survey data and the qualitative analysis of 39 in-depth interviews with right-wing populist leaders, mainstream party politicians and church officials. The findings of this analysis suggest a potential ‘religious vaccination effect’ among Christian voters against right-wing populism but underline its connection to elite actor behaviour. Specifically, the availability of a ‘Christian alternative’ in the party system, as well as religious leaders’ willingness and ability to create a social taboo around the populist right seem critically to impact religious immunity to populism.

Previous research has sought to explain the rise of right-wing populist leaders in terms of the evolutionary framework of dominance and prestige. In this framework, dominance is defined as high social rank acquired via coercion and fear, and prestige is defined as high social rank acquired via competence and admiration. Previous studies have shown that right-wing populist leaders are rated as more dominant than non-populist leaders, and right-wing populist/dominant leaders are favoured in times of economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict. In this paper, we explore and critique this application of dominance–prestige to politics. First, we argue that the dominance–prestige framework, originally developed to explain inter-personal relationships within small-scale societies characterised by face-to-face interaction, does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies which have frequent anonymous interaction and complex ingroup–outgroup dynamics. Second, we show that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict a preference not only for dominant leaders, but also for prestigious leaders. Third, we show that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are not fixed, and depend on the political ideology of the perceiver: people view leaders who share their ideology as prestigious, and those who oppose their ideology as dominant, whether that ideology is liberal or conservative. Fourth, we show that political ideology is a stronger predictor than economic uncertainty of preference for Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election, contradicting previous findings that link Trump's success to economic uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that, if economic uncertainty does not directly affect preferences for right-wing populist leaders, other features of their discourse such as higher emotionality might explain their success.

This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.

What populist right parties offer (the supply side) should be examined in relation to the preferences of the populist right electorate (the demand side). This article examines how the supply and demand in the electoral market are met by assessing the relative importance of party, party leader, and district-level candidate for the right-wing populist vote. The study is set in an electoral system, which uses preferential voting for candidates in multi-member districts, namely Finland, where all three objects of vote choice may matter. We analyse post-election survey data for the 2011 parliamentary election in which the right-wing populist True Finns party gained almost one fifth of the national vote. The results show that being guided by the characteristics of the party leader is a much stronger predictor the of the True Finns vote than being affected by party or district-level candidate characteristics.