Government & Opposition editors Laura Cram and Erik Jones introduce and updated collection of articles across the subject of ‘populism’ which can be found below.

In our last update to the populism collection, we placed our emphasis on grounding the debate on populism in the wider study of political science.  You can read the introduction to that updated collection here.  Since then, Government & Opposition has published three articles on FirstView that we believe scholars working in the area might find of interest.  As with our last update, these articles are not focused primarily on populism in Europe, but they do contribute to the wider debate.

- David Andersen and Suthan Krisnarajan look at the relationship between economic crisis and democratic breakdown.  They find that a competent bureaucracy can play an important stabilizing role for democratic systems by helping to shield citizens from the inequities that economic downturns often foster.  Good government is important for democratic stability.

- Christopher Prosser and Jonathan Mellon survey recent changes in public opinion polling performance.  They show there is little evidence that ‘shy voters’ who hide their true intentions are what distorts polling analysis and much more reason to believe that poor polling performance is a function of bad modelling.  Voters are revealing their preferences.

- Finally, and most recently, Steffen Blings examines the relationship between social movements and niche political parties, focusing primarily on the cases in Sweden and Germany.  What he shows is the lasting influence that social movements have on the political agendas of the parties they create.  Social movements matter for the study of niche political parties.

- Laura Cram and Erik Jones, August 2018.

You can access the updated Populism in Europe collection here.