Do populists erode civil society?

Abstract

Populists claim to empower ‘the people’, but do they help or hinder one of the foremost arenas in which people voluntarily engage with others – civil society? We study this question using a global panel of 79 countries (1970–2019) that combines party-level populism scores with legislative ideology and six indicators of the civil-society environment. We reduce the indicators using factor analysis to two outcomes: civil-society freedom and civil-society structure. We estimate country- and year-fixed-effects models and use lagged specifications and election-year interactions as timing diagnostics to assess whether the estimates are likely to be driven by contemporaneous electoral feedback. We find that greater right-wing populist representation is consistently associated with subsequent declines in both civil-society freedom and structure, while average associations for left-wing populism are small and often indistinguishable from zero. The right-populist association is conditioned by partisan balance, being strongest where right-wing parties dominate.