Populism and the rule of law: The importance of institutional legacies

Abstract Existing work sees populist governments undermining the rule of law because they seek to dismantle institutional constraints on their personalistic plebiscitarian rule. We argue that populist rulers pose a greater threat to legal impartiality, equality, and compliance when they face a legacy of weak rule of law. We find empirical support for this assertion after applying synthetic control methods to a cross‐country sample that includes up to 51 populist events spanning the period from 1920 to 2019. Our results remain consistent across a range of robustness checks including, the consideration of a set of contextual variables that can potentially determine the capacity of populist governments to sweep away institutional constraints, different populist event classifications, and different ways of measuring the rule of law. In countries, like the United States, with a robust rule of law tradition, the deleterious impact of populists on institutions will be limited but not negligible.