The drunken dinner guest of democratic politics: Constitutional conventions and populism as a transgressive political style

Comparative legal literature increasingly stresses the fundamental importance of informal norms that underpin democratic and constitutional governance. A particular species of these informal norms is the constitutional convention. Although there is wide recognition of the fact that populism constitutes a key issue of constitutional resilience in our time, the issue of constitutional resilience with regard to the relationship between populist political style and constitutional conventions has been largely overlooked. This article maps the extent to which populism threatens constitutional resilience in democratic systems which rely substantively on constitutional conventions. Bringing together political science and legal theory, it offers a conceptual analysis of conventions and of populism as a political style. It explains the perceived tension between the two phenomena and unfolds the argument that populism should be conceived as a transgressive political style, which is fundamentally hostile to the notion of unwritten constitutional law or practice. This hostility endangers the resilience of constitutional systems, particularly in view of the structural vulnerability of conventions as norms of self-restraint (lacking independent enforcement mechanisms).