Fundamentals

Liberalism vs Populism: Differences and Limits on Power

By Daniel Sardá · Published on September 06, 2026

8 min read1,563 words

Addressing popular demands and claiming to speak for the entire people are different things. That distinction offers a liberal perspective on populism.

Imagine a party that wins an election and announces that its opponents no longer represent a legitimate alternative: anyone who opposes the government opposes the people. The example is hypothetical. The dilemma it raises is concrete: does an electoral victory authorize the winner to decide who deserves a place in political life?

Here lies a decisive difference between liberalism and populism. From a classical liberal perspective, a mandate to govern must coexist with rights, checks on power, and legitimate opposition. In the accounts of populism examined here, tension arises when someone claims to represent the only authentic people and dismisses those who disagree as illegitimate.

To understand liberalism in relation to populism, it helps to separate three questions: what the terms mean, how they relate to economics, and how they help us assess the exercise of power. A leader's chosen label settles none of these questions.

What Do We Mean by Liberalism and Populism?

Classical liberalism places individual liberty, property, and equality before the law among the criteria for judging institutions. Power needs limits because people retain lives of their own: they can associate, express opinions, and pursue projects that the government or the majority does not share.

That is this article's normative standpoint. It expresses how we believe power should be organized; it does not assume that everyone described as liberal respects these principles.

Cas Mudde's approach offers a useful way to define populism. In “The Populist Zeitgeist”, he characterizes it through a moral opposition between a people conceived as homogeneous and a corrupt elite, together with the demand that politics express the general will of that people. Its limited ideological core can combine with other ideologies.

Jan-Werner Müller adds a criterion relevant to this comparison: the claim to represent the legitimate people exclusively. As he explains in an interview published by Princeton, criticizing elites is not enough to identify populism. What is decisive in his approach is anti-pluralism: denying that other groups can legitimately represent citizens with different views.

These are analytical approaches, not a definition that settles every debate about the term. Using them makes it possible to identify the problem precisely without calling every opponent a populist.

It also requires distinguishing related concepts. Demagoguery seeks support through flattery or misleading promises; authoritarianism involves an exercise of power that restricts political competition and freedoms. They may be related to populism, but they are not synonyms. Nor is a proposal for redistribution, a referendum, or charismatic leadership sufficient on its own to establish that classification.

Key idea: A demand can be popular and legitimate without giving its advocates the right to speak for all of society.

Economic Policy Alone Does Not Establish the Difference

The distinction between political and economic liberalism helps avoid a common shortcut. The former concerns freedoms, safeguards, and checks on power. The latter focuses on private property, contracts, and market exchange. These dimensions are related, but a single economic decision does not demonstrate a commitment to all those safeguards.

Suppose the party in our example lowers barriers to starting a business. That measure could expand economic freedom. If the party simultaneously maintains that its critics have no legitimate right to compete, making it easier to start a business does not answer the political objection. Both actions need to be assessed on their merits.

Likewise, debating a social benefit does not establish that its proponents are populists. Its justification, rules, and effects matter; applying the definitions above would also require examining how its proponents understand the people and their opponents.

Populism's capacity to combine with other ideologies, as Mudde notes, explains why an economic program alone does not define it. The label does not imply a fixed size of government, a particular trade policy, or a universal economic outcome. An institutional comparison requires looking at who decides, what limits apply, and how those in power treat people who might challenge them for office.

Representing a Majority Is Not the Same as Embodying the People

Pluralism begins by recognizing that society contains different interests, convictions, and projects. Its members can disagree profoundly and remain citizens with equal rights. They need not share political convictions to deserve protection.

An electoral majority makes it possible to take decisions under the rules of the system. It does not turn those who form that majority into the whole community. Those who lose retain the opportunity to organize, persuade, and win later. Without that possibility, political competition ceases to offer a meaningful alternative.

Return to our imaginary party. It can argue that its proposal received more support and that it has a mandate to implement it. The problematic leap comes when it declares that any opposition stands outside the people. At that point, it replaces a verifiable statement about votes with a moral claim to exclusive representation.

Democracy includes participation, competition, and the possibility of replacing those who govern; reducing it to a majority vote leaves out essential features. Liberal democracy combines these elements with individual rights and restrictions on the exercise of power. Disagreement can change a policy without those involved losing the safeguards that make debate possible.

John Stuart Mill offers a liberal basis for this caution in the opening chapters of On Liberty: collective self-government does not eliminate the possibility that some people will exercise power over others, and majority pressure can also threaten liberty. This is a historical normative argument, not a study of contemporary populism.

From that perspective, limits on power give a mandate a defined scope. An independent court can review a decision; an opposition can scrutinize it; an individual can seek protection for their rights. None of these actions, in itself, amounts to rejecting popular sovereignty.

The tension with exclusive representation is clear: if a leader identifies with the entire people, any check on power can be portrayed as an attack on the community. This is the institutional risk worth assessing, without claiming that every movement classified as populist necessarily ends in dictatorship.

Key idea: The right to dissent remains valuable precisely when a government has majority support.

What If Populism Gives Voice to Previously Ignored Demands?

This objection deserves attention. A movement may give voice to citizens whose needs have been left off the public agenda. Dismissing those demands because of the label attached to their spokespeople avoids addressing their substance and leaves the problem of representation unresolved.

Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser explores this ambivalence in “The ambivalence of populism: threat and corrective for democracy”: populism can act as a corrective in terms of inclusion and as a threat to the ability to contest power publicly, depending on the case. This argument allows both dimensions to be examined without assuming a universal verdict on their overall balance.

Whether a demand gains a public hearing is one question. Whether its representatives respect others' right to organize and challenge them is another. Recognizing the first gain does not require accepting a concentration of power; identifying the second threat does not refute the original demand either.

There is a further objection: institutional checks can protect privilege. An opaque procedure, an unjustified barrier to participation, or an unaccountable authority does not deserve automatic defense simply because it is long established. The liberal criterion proposed here asks whether those institutions apply general rules and allow their decisions to be challenged.

The response requires concrete reforms. If a rule unjustifiably excludes certain citizens, it must be open to revision through public procedures with safeguards. If an authority abuses its power, it must be held accountable. Institutional independence cannot mean immunity from scrutiny.

But correcting exclusion does not justify giving a leader unchecked decision-making power either. A reform should be judged by the opportunities and safeguards it leaves available to everyone, including its critics. The test is especially demanding when those critics are unpopular.

Key idea: Giving neglected voices a hearing and preserving the right to challenge the government must be assessed together.

How to Apply the Comparison to Any Government

This discussion becomes useful when it helps us examine conduct. The same criteria must apply to those who present themselves as liberals, populists, or neither:

• Legitimate opposition: Do they recognize that their opponents can represent citizens, compete, and take office?
• General rules: Do the rules protect rights and enforce responsibilities regardless of a person's connections to those in power?
• Effective checks: Do they accept independent review, scrutiny, and reform procedures that can also constrain their own decisions?
• Individual protection: Do dissenters retain their freedom of expression and association, and their ability to defend their rights?

Not every criticism of a judge undermines judicial independence, and not every institutional reform concentrates power. Judging a proposal requires looking at which powers it changes, which avenues of challenge it preserves, and who will be able to use them. Likewise, invoking liberty does not by itself establish liberal conduct.

When a reform is defended as the will of the people, one concrete question helps sharpen the assessment: would these powers still be acceptable if an opponent exercised them tomorrow? Answering it requires thinking about institutions that can endure changes of government. Those who support the government today may tomorrow need the safeguards that allow them to dissent from it.