Party Competition, Populism, and Sovereignty Transfer to International Organizations

• Applicants: Dr. Alexandr Burilkov; Professor Dr. Tobias Lenz
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 554040170

How does the participation of populist parties in party competition shape the transfer of national sovereignty to international organizations? Decisions to transfer sovereignty to international organizations are taken by domestic political actors, notably political parties and the governments they form, in a specific domestic context of which populism has become a central element in many democracies worldwide. This project proposes to investigate the populism-sovereignty transfer linkage, which is highly relevant as party competition and political polarization are driven to a significant degree by controversies over internationalism versus the supremacy of national sovereignty. It responds to three significant research gaps: the systematic measurement of sovereignty transfer; the causal mechanisms by which populist parties participate in party competition to contest sovereignty transfer to international organizations; cross-regional comparative analysis of these dynamics. The aim of the project is to study the impact of the participation of populist parties in party competition on sovereignty transfer in consolidating democracies. We seek to identify broad trends and patterns in the transfer of national sovereignty to international organizations and develop and test cross-regional mid-range theory on the populism-sovereignty transfer linkage. The empirical focus of the project is on Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, core regions of the third wave of democratisation, in which “liberal” regional international organizations – Mercosur and the EU – have their authority increasingly contested by populist actors. The project adopts a mixed-methods methodology structured around three work packages. Work Package 1 constructs a state-level dataset of sovereignty transfer covering 178 countries (1970-2019), with sovereignty transfer as the dependent variable and party competition as the main independent variable. Work Package 2 uses process-tracing methodology for theory-building using the influential cases of Brazil (1991-2024) and Poland (2004-2024), which show that it is possible for right-wing populist parties to be electorally defeated by mainstream parties that openly embrace internationalism, including sovereignty transfer. Finally, Work Package 3 comparatively studies Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe by constructing a subset of the dataset from WP1 focusing exclusively on these regions (2004-2019) that incorporates additional data from CHES Europe/Latin America, with the aim of testing the theory-building of WP 2.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants