ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the focus is on an analysis of populism from within the perspective of the quality of democracy. The populist challenge puts democratic regimes under pressure. It intertwines and overlaps with other critical factors, both external (economic crises, international crises, migratory flows) and internal factors (corruption, decline of the traditional channels of representation, lack of alternation and dissatisfaction with the activities of governments). Moreover, in this kind of analysis, it is necessary to consider not only political-institutional factors but also social transformation, as for example the presence of structural problems (youth unemployment or the heterogeneity of the political community) and the growth of social inequality. In this context, the impact of the populist challenge is multifaceted. It extends over all the main dimensions of democratic quality – even if not all the relevant dimensions and their sub-dimensions are involved in the same way and with the same intensity. The outcome of the populist challenge can be a subversion of democratic quality, rather than the improvement or deepening of democracy. Hence, a meaningful perspective in the analysis of qualities, above all a realistic one, is to look at all the recurrent ways in which elites and citizens consciously or otherwise try to subvert those qualities for their political or private purposes. A closer look at the concrete problems of implementation of qualities should be complemented by an awareness of some of the opposing forces that have recently received attention in numerous papers and studies.
