Populist leaders don’t just claim to represent the people – they embody them. Through strongman toughness or maternal guardianship, populists model idealised versions of a nation’s citizens, and they naturalise exclusion. Selina Mabrouki shows how contemporary populist leaders exploit gendered role models as tools of emotional persuasion
In his introductory piece for this series, Luca Verzichelli asked whether we can re-establish a connection between political institutions and citizens. Dario Castiglione suggests we can. But first, we must rethink democratic representation as a process of mutual engagement; then re-imagine its political practices and institutions
The new Mayor of New York’s electoral campaign prioritised face-to-face interactions with voters. Western commentators have struggled to find a language for this new ‘politics of listening’. Portia Roelofs argues that this is a standard part of Nigerian political practice – and offers the potential for a new kind of accountability
Research on digital violence must account for its metapolitical dimension. Silvia Díaz Fernández reveals how proponents of the far-right metapolitical project are shaping public discourse to fit their anti-democratic interests. Digital violence against women, racialised people and queer communities is all part of their strategy
On 23 November 2025, Birzeit University in the Palestinian West Bank halted all teaching to mourn one of its law students, killed by Israeli gunfire in a nearby village. The case, says Serena Fraiese, reveals how freedom crumbles in the world outside academe before it even reaches campus
Alexandros Ntaflos argues that Trump and Mamdani’s unexpectedly cordial meeting reflects shared populist appeals to 'the people', and pragmatic calculations of institutional power. But as concrete policies emerge, left-right ideological divisions will reassert themselves. Future conflicts between the two will echo the broader Western shift toward radical politics
Zsófia Papp and Godfred Bonnah Nkansah show that during Covid-19, Hungarians judged the quality of democracy less by procedural norms and more by government performance. Their findings reveal when citizens in backsliding regimes accept violations of democratic standards – and when they refuse to compromise
Gulay Icoz explores how the rejuvenated Science of Democracy series – Science of Democracy 2.0 – challenges conventional democratic theory. Here, she explains how it opens new pathways for citizen-led innovation while raising critical questions about institutional grounding and feasibility
The global nuclear order is more crowded than ever, with new actors, rules, and arenas constantly emerging. Carmen Wunderlich and Martin Senn argue, however, that this is less chaos than a continuous process of ordering and disordering. They show how nuclear politics are made, unmade, and remade in everyday practice
Elias Koch finds that opposition parties become more confrontational towards the government when losing in the polls, and particularly when their support drops below the previous election result. But what does this mean for political systems thriving on an antagonistic relationship between the opposition and the executive?
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