The project team are planning to advance their work by a combination of doctrinal legal analysis, socio-legal analysis, philosophy of law and empirical enquiry, but also by engagement with a range of other scholars connected to the work.
[Martin to write more?]
With that in mind, the project aims are to:
- address the explanatory and normative value of, and refine the concept of, ‘populism’, which is widely used but widely contested in relation to a worldwide spread of ‘populist’ parties and an increasing number of ‘populist’ victories in the past decade;
- advance knowledge about interrelationships between contemporary forms of populism and liberal democracy, authoritarianism, political discourse, and law (particularly constitutional law);
- via case studies – identify, reconstruct, and evaluate, legal and constitutional aims of, and institutional solutions adopted by, new populist regimes;
- develop an empirically grounded and theoretically elaborated assessment of new populism as a phenomenon, with a particular focus on the character and consequences of ‘populism in power’, and available responses to it – drawing upon comparative case analysis to contrast countries where constitutionalism appears more institutionalised and resilient, and those where it seems less so; and
- inform regional and global political engagement, in response to newly divergent understandings of legal and constitutional constraints on the exercise of democratically-mandated power.
[Visibility for those working with the project]
[Directions for those interested in the project]
Constitutional populism: 