Mandate Inflation: How Populists Claim Authority to Challenge Global Constraints
Abstract
Populist leaders often say they are restoring popular sovereignty against treaties, courts, trade rules, migration regimes, expert bodies, and international organizations. Yet their behavior toward international order varies. They may withdraw, renegotiate, obstruct, selectively comply, or perform public defiance while remaining inside institutions. This article explains that variation through mandate inflation: a process of turning a vote into a broader political claim in which an election or referendum is recast from a limited permission to govern into wider authority to challenge constraints in the name of the people. A structured comparison of Trump's ‘America First’ politics, Brexit's ‘take back control’ discourse, and Viktor Orbán's conflict with EU constraints shows four recurrent moves: mandate condensation, construction of ‘the real people,’ reframing of constraints as anti-democratic obstruction, and assertion of special authority to act. The argument does not replace material, institutional, or nationalist explanations. It shows how leaders present these strategies as the will of the people; it does not assume that audiences accepted those claims or that rhetoric alone caused policy choices. The article contributes to recent debates on global populism by showing why exit is only one possible outcome of populist constraint politics. Keywords: Populism, mandate, global governance, international institutions, sovereignty, Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orbán