LIST OF PANELS

Among the numerous issues connecting policy and politics, our panel investigates the influence of populist parties on policy outputs. Our theoretical challenge is to enrich policy analysis and democratic theories in analysing the potential influence that populist parties –notably through discourses during electoral campaigns, and participation in government and parliament – could exert on the production of policy outputs, at different levels of power. The issue of populist parties’ influence on policies remains overlooked despite their growing political importance and current research in the “do-parties-matter” and responsiveness literatures. The panel’s empirical contribution is to go beyond the usual suspects (e.g. migration policy) and include other policy sectors. Our methodological goal is to use different approaches, quantitative and qualitative (e.g. discourse analysis, impact assessment, process-tracing) to best study the impact on populist parties on policy outputs. The purpose of the panel is to provide a state of the art of emerging research in this issue as well as to suggest avenues for further research. Specifically, our panel is interested in contributions addressing at least one of these challenges: Theoretically: How analytically is the issue at hand to be handled? What do we learn from the literature at the intersection of policy analysis and political science? What avenues of research appear innovative? Empirically: What new case studies clarify the issue? What are the respective contributions of small-N studies and large-N studies to the empirical description of the question at hand? Methodologically: How do we identify populist parties’ policy preferences? Is data from manifestos sufficient? In addition, how do we measure policy activities? (through the analysis of policy agendas – see the comparative agenda project, public spending, choice of policy instruments?). Last, how do we assess causality between populist parties’ discourse and policy proposals and policy outputs?

The panel aims at investigating the impact of populist parties’ policy discourse on policy outputs. Populist parties have recently gained electoral prominence across Europe (Albertazzi and Mueller 2013), be it at the subnational level, as illustrated by the newly elected Front national mayors in France, or at the national level, as exemplified by the probable entrance of the Flemish NVA to the Belgian federal government. Even when they are not part of governing coalitions, populist parties in Europe have increasingly shaped governmental policy agendas by pushing forward certain issues (Mudde 2007). While the influence of populist parties on politics has already been largely documented through case studies and comparative endeavours, the issue of populist parties’ influence on public policies is still overlooked despite their growing political importance. The panel intends to contribute to this area of questioning. Policy studies offer insights to analyse the impact of populist parties on policy outputs. Theoretically, the “do-parties-matter” literature (Castles, 1982; Huber and Stephens, 2001; Schmidt, 1996) was recently reinvigorated by research that looks at the changes in electoral constituencies and at the institutional context of party competition to assess the impact of political parties on policy decisions and outputs (for a review see Haüsermann, Picot and Geering, 2013). However, the major drawback of this strand of research is to mainly focus on mainstream governing parties to the exclusion of populist parties. This panel intends to contribute to this strand of literature by bringing populist parties into the analysis. From an additional theoretical point of view, the booming literature on policy responsiveness (Wlezien and Soroka 2010) also opens avenues to study how populist parties’ influence on agenda formation may bring mainstream political parties to adopt public policies that respond to shifts of public opinion on certain issues (e.g. immigration, welfare). Typologies of populism date back to more than three decades (Canovan 1981). Scholars have gone further after the electoral success of populism across Europe. And methodologically, existing research suggests a diversity of indicators to investigate migration policies (Howard 2010, Akkerman 2012). In the same sector, the combination of qualitative discourse and quantitative content analysis is operationalised (van Ostaijen and Scholten, 2014) to determine the impact of populist parties’ governmental and legislative participation on policies. Hence, the panel specifically focuses on three main questions: Theoretically: How analytically is the issue at hand to be handled? What do we learn from the literature at the intersection of policy analysis and political science? What avenues of research appear innovative? Empirically: What new case studies clarify the issue? What are the respective contributions of small-N studies and large-N studies to the empirical description of the question at hand? Methodologically: How do we identify populist parties’ policy preferences? Is data from manifestos sufficient? In addition, how do we measure policy activities? (through the analysis of policy agendas – see the comparative agenda project, public spending, choice of policy instruments?). Last, how do we assess causality between populist parties’ discourse and policy proposals and policy outputs?