Responsible or responsive? How new challenger parties use both technocratic and populist rhetoric to present a solution to the perceived crisis of representative democracy

Political parties are having trouble adapting to the perceived crisis of representative democracy: political conflict is not as predictable as it once was in established democracies. The linking function parties are supposed to perform between the government on the one hand and citizens on the other is being eroded respectively by the limited power of the nation-state in a globalised world of radical uncertainty and by the decline in political trust. When limited power of governing parties is met with high expectations from voters (also caused by unrealistic opposition or campaign rhetoric), the result is an electoral beating/triumph at the polls and a disillusioned and volatile electorate. Following that reasoning, one would assume that political parties are victims of unchanging global trends and fickle human beings. However, studying the decline of party government from those perspectives loses sight of the agency parties have. This paper assumes first of all that political parties have more power than often assumed in deterministic explanations of the complicated nature of multilevel governance. Nor are they powerless in the face of increased volatility on the demand side of democratic politics. A second assumption is that mainstream and challenger parties confront a different type of problem when confronted with declining political trust and increased volatility. Mainstream parties try to maintain their place in a party system that may no longer be structured along a familiar economic left-right dimension; whereas challengers may have more credibility in exploring the cultural dimension of a party system and their place in it, forcing mainstream parties to take positions they have no issue ownership over. A third assumption is that all political parties struggle with how to respond to the crisis of representative democracy: should they focus on being seen as responsible potential governing partners or rather as responsive to a volatile electorate? Dealignment has made sure that even novice challenger parties may be called upon to join a government coalition after scoring a surprisingly high vote share at their election participation. Yet at the same time, newcomers can also respond to voters’ concerns without baggage from previous governing experiences weighing down their credibility. This paper asks the question of how new challenger parties in particular balance this call for responsibility on the one hand with responsiveness on the other. To which extent do new parties turn to populist or technocratic solutions when confronted with the perceived crisis of representative democracy? In a quest to find an empirical answer to a challenged representative democracy, this paper centres political parties and asks how especially newcomers balance praising technocratic solutions in their manifestoes to seem responsible with using populist rhetoric to show their responsive merits. Party manifestoes of new challenger parties in the last 20 years in the Netherlands are analysed qualitatively to find an answer to the research question.