The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy* FRANK DECKER T here is currently a wave of interest in populism and populist politics. This is the result in particular of the spread of a new type of political party which first emerged in the 1980s and was soon characterized by the term»right-wing populism«. Apart from a few exceptions, there are right-wing populist parties today in all Western democracies. Many have now established themselves in the party system of their country and are winning double-digit percentages of the vote in elections. In some coun­tries, the right-wing populists have even managed to establish themselves in national government. After some delay, political scientists began to study right-wing popu­list phenomena intensively in the 1990s. There are now numerous com­parative international studies which analyze the emergence of the new parties and attempt to explain the diverging results in the various coun­tries(for example, Betz 1994; Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Betz and Im­merfall 1998; Decker 2000). There is general agreement that this is a »multi-factorial« phenomenon, which cannot be traced to any single cause. Observers at first expected that right-wing populism would be only a short-lived phenomenon, and that sooner or later the parties would dis­appear. This optimism has long faded, and it is now acknowledged that the right-wing populist parties have established a solid base and must be expected to continue to exist in the future. However, there is still no con­sensus about what consequences this will have, or about how populism should be assessed from the point of view of democratic»health«. Whereas some see it as embodying a basic democratic impulse with its criticism of the distortions of the political system, others point to the dan­gers that populist phenomena can pose directly or indirectly for the de­velopment of democracy. The problem is that at this general level both * The original German version of this article was published in Berliner Republik 3/ 2003 under the title»Der gute und der schlechte Populismus«. ipg 3/2003 Decker, The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy 47