Pundits and academics alike are increasingly concerned about the health of democracy worldwide. Much of this concern is tied to the rise of populism, a global phenomenon presenting challenges to both long-established and relatively young democracies. Political science has been at the forefront of this debate, and thanks to a growing—but not universal—consensus on the ideational definition of populism, our understanding of the subject has deepened considerably. This symposium maps key debates on the complex and often ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy. In this concluding piece, we build on the arguments presented throughout the symposium and related academic discussions to outline two paths for future research on the populism and democracy nexus: a top-down and a bottom-up perspective.

The rise of populism as a global phenomenon has captured the attention of scholars and raised concerns about its impact on democracy. Thanks to a growing academic consensus around an ideational definition of populism, one can observe the generation of important cumulative knowledge on the relationship between populism and democracy. Political science has been at the forefront of this development, and this symposium seeks to both offer state-of-the art information on this topic and discuss blind spots that future studies should try to address.

With a proliferation of scholarly work focusing on populist, far-left, and far-right parties, questions have arisen about the correct ways to ideologically classify such parties. To ensure transparency and uniformity in research, the discipline could benefit from a systematic procedure. In this letter, we discuss how we have employed the method of ‘Expert-informed Qualitative Comparative Classification’ (EiQCC) to construct the newest version of The PopuList (3.0) – a database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties in Europe since 1989. This method takes into account the in-depth knowledge of national party experts while allowing for systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time. We also examine how scholars have made use of the previous versions of the dataset, explain how the new version of The PopuList differs from previous ones, and compare it to other data. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of The PopuList dataset.

COVID-19 shocked the world and provided a particular challenge for populist radical right (PRR) forces. We lay out three research questions that this special issue addresses through case studies of the PRR in government in Brazil, Hungary, Turkey and the US and in opposition in France, Italy, Germany and Spain: (1) How have PRR actors responded to the pandemic? (2) How have PRR actors framed the politics of the pandemic? and (3) What have been the effects of the pandemic on the popularity of the PRR? We explain the case selection of this special issue and summarize the main findings of the eight case studies, which show that the pandemic did not severely damage the PRR and that they had very different responses to the challenge. This reinforces the idea that the PRR is not ephemeral but is rather the by-product of structural transformations of contemporary societies and is here for the foreseeable future.

This contribution is conceived as a resource on the state of European populist parties before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports on cross-national comparative findings generated by data collected from 30 European countries as to the state of populist parties in one calendar year (2019) and provides an extensive qualitative overview of the national cases. The article shows that while populist parties are preponderantly on the right, there is a significant degree of ideological variation among European populism. The data show significant diversity in their electoral performance but also that populist party participation in government is no longer a marginal phenomenon. The article ultimately elaborates on the various types of positions on European integration – from soft/hard Euroscepticism to lack thereof – and discusses the implications of their affiliation in the European Parliament.

In this article the special issue on the future of democracy is introduced with a discussion of the rationale and a brief overview of the contributions that follow. In addition the authors highlight four major themes that run through the special issue. These themes are: the measurement of democracy, the importance of time and context for understanding democracy, the importance of institutions in the process of democratization, and the differential role of government and opposition in democracy. The article finishes with a conclusion about the plural nature and possible futures for democracy.