Ideas or Strategy? The Impact of Populist Incumbents on Liberal Democracy
2026-07-08
Scholarship on populism has long identified a negative association between populism in power and the decline of democracy-sustaining institutions. However, researchers’ understanding of the theoretical links between these two phenomena differ and scholars have been hesitant to test competing approaches to populism against each other on equal footing. In this study, we address this lacuna, contrasting the theoretical predictions from the ideational and political-strategic approaches to populism side by side. To do so, we discuss the theoretical arguments undergirding the cross-case relationship between populism and democratic decline, then derive measures for each approach and compare them empirically. We use both conventional frequentist as well as Bayesian statistical methods to compare these approaches. Within both statistical paradigms, we find that measures derived from the ideational approach outperform measures derived from the political-strategic approach.