The role of social movements and civil society actors in rights advancement has been frequently emphasised. The assumption is that legal mobilisation by civil society actors works towards the extension of rights and the emancipation and advancement of justice for distinctive (minority) groups in society. While traditionally, socio-legal attention on social movement and civil society actions around rights promotion was particularly prominent in the US, for some time now the European context has also been approached from such a socio-legal lens. However, a one-sided, liberal–progressive understanding of social mobilisation around rights has, importantly, been put to the test by recent manifestations of societal actors. Conservative actors tend to (1) promote a restrictive interpretation or a radical reinterpretation of existing rights (e.g. abortion, free speech), (2) limit the diffusion of new rights (e.g. the rights to euthanasia or legalizing surrogate maternity) and/or (3) call for the interruption of the further extensions of rights (e.g. with regard to same-sex marriage, LGBTIQ issues). The analysis of legal mobilisation by such conservative right-wing actors indicates that mobilisational repertoires are strikingly similar to those of liberal actors. This article will discuss the notions of civil society and legal mobilisation and call for a rethinking of these concepts, in part because of the increasing manifestation of societal actors that are in contrast to the traditional liberal paradigm. The article will subsequently engage in a detailed study of one such actor – the Polish legal think tank Ordo Iuris (OI) – with regard to its third-party or amicus curiae interventions at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), stressing the difference of orientation of such interventions from those of liberal actors and also indicating dimensions of ambivalence and similarity in their approaches.

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on ‘Populism and Right-Wing Legal Mobilization in Europe’. We point to the dependence of populists in power on non-state actors: populist governments have ideological and political reasons to need the support of civil society’s right-wing representatives and have the financial and institutional means to strengthen those organizations. We then map right-wing legal mobilization in Europe based on the analyses in the special issue. By right-wing legal mobilization, we understand the organized efforts, resources, and strategies employed by individuals, groups, or organizations with conservative or right-leaning ideologies to embody their values in positive law and its interpretation. The text concludes with a dynamic normative framework to assess this type of mobilization. Drawing on recent contributions from comparative constitutional law, human rights, and socio-legal studies, we argue that the analysis and evaluation of right-wing legal mobilization could be based on a comprehensive analysis of three bundles of issues: (1) the relationship between mobilizing actors and the courts, as well as the local standard of judicial independence, (2) the relation of right-wing argumentation to systemic linkages and historical trajectories of human rights, (3) the redistributive effect (economic and symbolic) and the potential success of such mobilization on the legal capacities of other actors who may have opposing interests. From this perspective, the problematic part of right-wing legal mobilization in the context of populism is, therefore, not its ideological, conservative character but its influence on the rule of law to gain strategic advantage. In the process, the very idea of the rule of law and the related issue of civic agency may be compromised.

Though the Polish rule of law crisis has been on the scholarly agenda since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) took power in 2015, the individual agents of legal disruption within the judiciary have been largely off the radar. This intervention aims to fill this gap. This article analyses the legal mobilisation practices of the Supreme Court (SC) judges appointed by the PiS party in a court-packing manner after 2017. It is argued that this is a specific type of legal mobilisation; because it is conducted from within the legal system by judges, it aims to challenge doctrinal views strategically and to legitimise the status of unlawfully elected judges, which consequently destabilises the legal system. Because the legal tools to solve the conflict appear to have been exhausted, new judges engage in public discourse to convince citizens that they have a right to sit on the bench. In the first part of this paper, I critically analyse this public discourse in order to explain the framing of the rule of law crisis. The analysis of this discourse is drawn from 106 texts produced by new SC judges between 2017 and 2023. It is argued that although the ‘populist’ group of SC judges is internally differentiated and does not exhibit clear ideological linkage with the PiS party, it strategically produces certain legal narratives in which their appointments and judicial practices at the SC conform to the Constitution and to relevant statutes and, as such, are legitimate in legal terms. The new judges’ narratives are based on four populist dichotomies that distinguish them from old judges (legitimacy–lack of legitimacy, autonomy–political dependence, formal rule of law–legal anarchy and accountability–corporatism). In the second part, the article proceeds to analyse selected case law of the Supreme Court to explore whether and how court-packing makes it more responsive to the legal mobilisation of the conservative Christian organisation Ordo Iuris (OI) and helps the governing party maintain its power. It is argued that the judicial mobilisation inside the packed Supreme Court is mostly of a discursive nature, as there is limited evidence that newly appointed judges side ideologically with the government and right-wing organisations in recent case law.

Generation Z is the most educated and yet pessimistic about the future. At the same time, populist parties have much support among young voters. Do they find an answer to their discouraging socio-economic situation in populist appeals? In this article, we analyse how pessimistic economic expectations shape the preference for populist parties among the young in Spain. By using conjoint experiments, we explore which specific features of populist parties (‘thin’ or ‘thick’ characteristics) are decisive in attracting young and pessimistic voters. Unlike older generations, for whom immigration is the most relevant factor, Generation Z, especially the pessimistic, focuses more on the thin ideological elements of populism. This finding contradicts previous experimental studies, which argue that thin populist characteristics are irrelevant in explaining the general population’s voting behaviour. Ideology plays a significant mediating role, as young pessimists on the left tend to be attracted by anti-elitism, while those on the centre-right by people-centrism.

Recent years have seen a surge of politicians campaigning on policies that aim to deter asylum applicants. We present a game-theoretic model in which foreign nationals consider applying for asylum and bureaucrats decide their case if they apply. We show that while policies that make the asylum application less attractive decrease the probability that foreign nationals apply, they also endogenously raise the credibility of applicants’ claims to political persecution and, therefore, may not decrease the number of admitted refugees. Investigating how these competing effects shape asylum policy-making, we show how policy choices depend on bureaucrats’ leniency and politicians’ objectives. Our analysis speaks to the causes of restrictive asylum policies and their limited effectiveness in reducing immigration.

Across the developed democracies, there has been a rise in populist nationalism and anti-globalization sentiment aimed at reasserting sovereignty through the state. This article develops the concept of discursive power as an alternative basis for citizens to project their voice and influence into global politics. Discursive power arises from the framing role of ideas in orienting citizen judgements to the possibilities for acting beyond the state, as a precursor to deliberative forms of persuasion and agreement. Discursive power is ‘democratic’, we argue, when it enables those affected by global issues and problems to conceive of themselves as collective agents capable of responding. Generating discursive power outside the state, however, requires informal representatives to serve as interlocutors. Drawing on recent theories of representation, we describe how the claims of non-state actors could support the production and mobilization of citizens' discursive powers across borders. Our analysis underscores the importance of claim-making for progressive responses to globalization centred on the judgements of citizens. We conclude by surveying several challenges for democratic discursive power at the transnational and global levels and suggest some background institutions and practices to enhance this power.

This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of “the people” necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose “authoritarian populism” feeds on and reinforces anti-Black racial prejudice. The second is Peronism, which has an ambivalent relationship with race that promises to shed important new light on this classic case of populism. The third case is that of the American Populists, whose pioneering experiments in interracial politics remain an enduring illustration of populism’s progressive potential. In each case, we focus on a key document from that political regime/movement: the Conservative Manifesto of 1979, the Peronist Constitution of 1949, and the Omaha Platform of 1892. The article concludes that populism, as a logic of action, acts as a catalyst that intensifies whatever specific content is mobilised – racist and anti-racist content alike.

This study provides a first empirical test of Margaret Canovan's influential argument on the relationship between democracy and populism, which posits that populism emerges as a consequence of the unresolved conflict between the pragmatic and redemptive faces of democracy. Despite its impact on scholars of populism, the implications of her framework remain untested. Using data from the EVS/WVS Integrated Values Surveys, we test Canovan's claims about the effect of ‘pragmatic politics’ on support for populist parties, operationalized as consensual democracies, economic and political globalization, and checks on government. Our analyses predominantly reveal no significant effects, and where significant results are observed, they indicate directions contrary to Canovan's claims, thus providing no empirical support for her claims. These results challenge long-standing assumptions about the relationship between populism and democracy, urging scholars to reevaluate existing assumptions and explore this intricate connection further. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future research to deepen our understanding of populism.

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 analytical essay proposes the notion of disjointed polarization to characterize the nature of polarization in contemporary Chile. In disjointed polarization, elite-level polarization does not lead to a successful electoral realignment. Disjointed polarization is thus consistent with a long-lasting crisis of representation in which a serial disconnect between politicians (pursuing different polarizing strategies) and a sizable fraction of the electorate persists, as voters remain alienated from old and emerging political elites. Because the structural changes that make disjointed polarization persist longer than expected in Chile today are widespread across Latin America, the essay speculates on the possibility that enduring disjointed polarization applies to other cases where neither a “populist realignment” nor “generative polarization” took place. Instead, disjointed polarization might reflect the onset of a new (non-partisan representation) normal.