The forthcoming article “Populism and the rule of law: The importance of institutional legacies” by Andreas Kyriacou and Pedro Trivin is summarized by the author(s) below.
Existing work sees populist governments undermining the rule of law because they seek to dismantle institutional constraints on their personalistic, plebiscitarian rule. We argue that the capacity of populists to undermine the rule of law depends on the degree to which the law is respected, and equally and impartially enforced before populists take office. A strong tradition or legacy of the rule of law — in the guise for example, of independent courts and impartial public administrations — is likely to limit the damage populists will inflict. Conversely, in countries with a weak tradition, the deleterious impact of populist governments on the rule of law is likely to be stronger.
We propose that the strength of a country’s rule-of-law tradition ultimately depends on the prevalence across society of social norms that define respect for the law as expected or appropriate behavior. In countries where respect for the rule of law is expected behavior, the negative impact of populist governments on the law will tend to be weaker because courts, public administrators and voters are more likely to oppose populists who try to remove legal constraints on the exercise of their power, and because populist governments themselves are more likely to comply with legal or administrative decisions checking their plebiscitarian rule.
We empirically examine the impact of rule-of-law legacies by applying synthetic control methods to a cross-country sample that includes up to 51 populist events characterized by the ascent of a populist leader to power and spanning the period from 1920 to 2019. Our empirical results reveal that while, on aggregate, the rise of populist governments leads to an 11.4 percentage point decline in the rule of law after 15 years, this reduction is larger in countries with a weak rule-of-law legacy (17.5 percentage points) and smaller in those with a strong rule-of-law tradition (5.8 percentage points). In the former group of countries, the sharp reduction in the rule of law soon after populists take office suggests that populist leaders, propelled by their electoral mandates, immediately proceed to attack institutions and quickly manage to do a great deal of damage.
The differential impact of populism in high versus low rule-of-law legacy settings is robust to a barrage of robustness checks, including the consideration of alternative factors that can potentially determine the capacity of populist governments to sweep away institutional constraints, as well as different populist event classifications and rule-of-law measures. Our findings suggest that in countries like the USA, with a robust rule-of-law tradition, the deleterious impact of populists on institutions will be limited but not negligible.
About the Author(s): Andreas Kyriacou is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the Universitat de Girona and Pedro Trivin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at the Università degli Studi di Milano. Their research “Populism and the rule of law: The importance of institutional legacies” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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