Threat or corrective to democracy? The relationship between populism and different models of democracy

Abstract The phenomenon of populism and its relationship with modern democracy has gained considerable attention in recent years. This article aims at advancing our understanding of how populism affects different models of democracy and tests the proposed arguments empirically. Building on a large scholarly literature on populism and democracy, we take stock of existing arguments and theorize which democratic models may be affected by populism in a positive or negative way. Moreover, we move beyond the normative debate and analyse the effect of populism in power on different models of democracy empirically. We do so by merging data on populist governments in Europe and Latin America from 1995 until today with the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which enables us to capture the relationship between populism and different democratic models in these regions. Despite mixed‐theoretical expectations, our results suggest a rather negative impact of populism on the electoral, liberal and deliberative models of democracy.