Measuring the Impact of Populism in the Face of EU Multi-level Governance: Politics and Constitutional Change

Once acceded the EU, all Member States, implicitly or explicitly, developed a constitutional strategy to deal with the supranational level. This chapter investigates the ways in which populist political strategies impact on the Member States’ constitutional strategies in the face of multi-level governance. By relying on the empirical studies that have investigated populism both as a political strategy and as a competing constitutional theory, this chapter proposes a model to measure the impact of populist political pushes on the national constitutional approach towards the EU. Such a model is based on the observation of the spread between political practice and institutional design in two fields: EU-related referendums and the parliamentary oversight of the executives in EU affairs.