Abstract This article discusses the respective rights and duties of citizens and civil servants to form alliances to counter populist parties in and out of government. It argues that civil servants under certain circumstances have a stronger role-specific responsibility to protect democratic rights and institutions than citizens in general. It also shows that the general requirement for actions undertaken to defend or restore democratic rights and institutions to be effective depends on how non-ideal circumstances are in terms of non-compliance with democratic principles and whether a course of action entails the violation of democratic rights. More broadly, the article demonstrates the need to combine empirical studies with normative theory to formulate legitimate responses to the populist challenge to democracy, as well as the difficulty of doing so.
This article presents a theoretical framework for studying the effectiveness of opposition to populist parties by civil society actors. Effective opposition to populist parties is the achievement of the goals of opposition without achieving perverse effects. Goals of opposition to populist parties are reducing support for populist parties; diminishing their material, organizational, and moral resources; ideological moderation; and, where relevant, curbing their ability to implement illiberal or undemocratic policies. Perverse effects, from the point of view of opponents, are increased support for populist parties boosting populist party resources; and ideological radicalization. Civil society actors can achieve these goals in three main ways: By disrupting the daily activities, civil society actors may reduce party support and organizational resources, while disruptive protests create social leverage, exploiting dependency of populist governments on political stability and consent. Civil society actors can form alliances with others, such as political parties able to use their governing resources against populist parties, or through litigation. Secondly, public critique at home and abroad, media campaigns and demonstrations may persuade others not to support populist parties and damage moral resources. Avoiding these negative consequences provides incentives for ideological moderation. Perverse effects may follow the effective mobilization of populist counter-discourses, linking opponents to elites or 'others' denigrated in populist discourse, boosting organizational cohesion and encouraging radicalization. The article contributes to research on 'democratic resilience' by identifying 'diagonal accountability' mechanisms, showing how these both shape incentives and work through persuasion.
Abstract This article introduces ParliamentLab.eu , an interactive application paired with a structured dataset, designed to support the exploration of voting behavior in the European Parliament (EP) from 2004 to 2022. ParliamentLab integrates publicly accessible datasets from VoteWatch.eu and Parltrack.eu, containing roll-call votes, biographical details, and attendance records into one intuitive interface. The application enables users to interactively filter data, visualize voting patterns, and perform hypothesis-driven exploration without requiring programming expertise. The user-adapted data can be downloaded as well. In its current form, ParliamentLab includes advanced techniques such as clustering and dimensionality reduction, modestly featuring a clustering process to show how underlying data structures can be identified. This feature supports interactive data exploration while keeping the focus on low-barrier accessibility. ParliamentLab provides researchers, educators, journalists, and the public with a transparent, reproducible, and user-friendly tool for engaging with legislative behavior in the EP.
