Populist Radical-Right Movements and Representative Democracy: Love It or Leave It
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contempt for the system of representative democracy is a trademark of populist movements. Therefore, they should have little desire to participate in parliamentary elections and thereby to legitimize the system they seek to combat. Yet, operating from within the state is often a more efficient way to truly impact state policies than pressures from outside. How populist movements resolve this dilemma between principles and participation is the subject of this paper. Surprisingly, despite the resurgence of populism in established democracies, little attention has been paid to this issue. Why do some movements rapidly accept the electoral game while others resist integration in the party system? How does the decision to participate to elections affect the internal coherence of the movements? My project analyzes these questions. Based on primary and secondary sources, as well as archival data and interviews, I examine how far-right populist movements, such as the Social Credit movement in Canada, The Croix de Feu and the Poujade movement in France, and the 5 Star Movement in Italy dealt with this dilemma between principles and participation. These cases have been chosen for the variation in the time they emerged (interwar for the Croix de Feu), 1930s for the Social Credit movement, 1950s for the Poujade movement, and 2000s for the 5 Star movement, the political and cultural environment in which they appeared, and the way they responded to the appeal of electoral politics. Preliminary findings seem to indicate that the sociological composition of the movement impacts the decisions to participate in elections, and that the level of uniformity in the social status of its members affect the movement’s propensity for internal strife.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".