POPBACK: Populist Backlash, Democratic Backsliding, and the Crisis of the Rule of Law in the European Union (CBR project)

Overview

Background, aims and objectives

The POPBACK project aims to inform strategies to increase democratic resilience by studying the mechanisms exclusionary populists use to increase their power by undermining the Rule of Law in the areas of law, the economy, and the media. The project also seeks to identify the coping strategies societal actors use when faced with exclusionary populism. It is funded by the NORFACE programme and is led by Gerhard Schnyder, currently Professor of International Management at the University of Loughborough, London, and a former research fellow in the CBR. Other participants, in addition to the CBR, are researchers from the London School of Economics; the Polish Academy of Sciences; Goethe University, Frankfurt; The Peace Institute, Ljubljana; the University of Vienna; Roehampton University, London; and the University of Delaware.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach spanning political economy, legal-, management-, and media studies, we compare Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and Turkey, all of which have experienced varying degrees of populist success. The project involves collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), which is tasked with setting up an International Policy Fellowships scheme for key stakeholders from the countries studied. In addition, the project members will collaborate with artists to stage a participatory performance in four cities to engage a dialogue with citizens from the countries being studied. Funding from the main part of the project ended in 2024, but work is continuing on outputs. Further support was received in 2024 from an academic fund at Glasgow University.

Methods

This project is organised into 4 work packages (WPs), focusing on:

1. legal changes (WP1)
2. business and economics (WP2)
3. media and communications (WP3)
4. impact (WP4)

The CBR’s involvement is mainly in WP1, and will take the form of the construction of datasets for measuring developments in laws relating to the business enterprise (labour and company laws) and in the institutional environment of the countries being studied.

Progress

The project began in December 2020. Louise Bishop and Simon Deakin worked on updating the CBR’s labour law and company law datasets, and Sveta Borodina, Simon Deakin and John Hamilton have published a related paper on the evolution of the rule of law in Russia. In the autumn of 2022, Irakli Barbakadze joined the project to work on econometric analysis of the CBR datasets and datasets tracking the incidence of populist policies and governments in the POPBACK countries and more generally. This work was largely completed during the academic year 2023/24, producing 2 working papers.