Populistische democratie: een contradictio in terminis

Referring to popular sovereignty, populism is often seen as a shadow cast by democracy itself. Especially, the two-strand models relate populism to the paradoxical duality within constitutional democracy which combines a liberal-constitutional pillar and a democratic pillar. Subsequently, populism is analyzed as continuous with the democratic pillar. In this article, we try to improve on the two-strand model by switching to a model of three logics: populism, democracy and liberalism. In order to investigate the relationship between populism and democracy, populism is defined as a thin-centred ideology which advocates the sovereign rule of the people as a homogeneous body. We maintain that (constitution al) democracy is characterized by its own coherent logic, essentially determined by the demand that in a democratic regime the locus of power should be an empty place. Our analysis explains populism as the closure of the empty place of democracy. We will argue that populist democracy is in the last resort an interna! contradiction because of the antagonistic discontinuity of the logic of populism and the logic of democracy.