The impact of ‘populism’ on European Public Policy

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ABSTRACT The populism literature has so far been relatively quiet about the impact of ‘populism’ on public policies. It has mainly focussed on populist actors and the link to their electorate and only rarely used the approaches and instruments of public policy analysis. This introduction proposes to recast the debate. We ask how populist agency and discursive mechanisms can be studied more systematically across democracies, sectors and policy fields and how one can conceive of populist ‘paradigms’ for public policies. Finally, we devise four avenues which future research should explore. The main takeaway from the conversation is that populism in policy-making can be best operationalised as a specific form of more direct representation, circumventing representative institutions and positing specific homogenous groups in society or multi-level contexts as the norm for policy-making.