Initiatives opposing populist parties in Europe: types, methods, and patterns

Departing from a critique of existing classification schemes in work on ‘militant’ and ‘defending’ democracy, the article presents a new typology for classifying initiatives opposing populist parties (IoPPs). The typology incorporates public authorities, political parties and civil society actors operating at state and supranational levels along one dimension, and tolerant and intolerant modes of engagement with populist parties on another dimension. The six types of opposition identified—rights-restrictions, ostracism, coercive confrontation, ordinary legal controls and pedagogy, forbearance, and adversarialism—are illustrated with empirical examples of opposition from populist parties in opposition and government, and by domestic actors and international organisations. The article then turns to outline methods for collecting data on IoPPs in contemporary Europe using a newspaper sampling techniques inspired by protest event and political claims analysis as a starting point. The final section presents four patterns of opposition to populist parties, ‘adapted-militancy’ (Germany), ‘political competition’ (Denmark); a ‘pincer-movement’ (Poland), and ‘differentiated ordinary opposition’ (Italy) models.