Focusing on the present European Crisis, the paper will try to clarify why, in a high rationalized context as the one of contemporary western societies, plebiscitary politics returns, and it appears as specifically connected to populism. Through an analysis that takes into account both the theoretical framework of democracy and the history of democratization in Europe, as it has mainly been explored in Max Weber’s political sociology, I will thematise the very relation between democracy and plebiscitarianism as well as its reference to populism of today. On the streamline of recent research on populism, plebiscitary and the audience-democracy, I will challenge as crucial issues the transformation of democratic context in a post-party society. Accordingly, mass party will be discussed in its own double-faced profile, that is both as ‘political machine’, which works to guarantee an organized consensus to political leaders, and as freestanding corporate entity, which peculiarly remains a political stakeholder.
Two points appear as fundamental within such a plebiscitary politics: firstly, how this mechanism, that classical theory has specifically analysed at the beginning of the passed century, is continuing to function up to now; secondly, whether trends in political modernity, which have recently reshaped mass-party democracy, are working massively to transform this functioning and how. Developing Weber’s own perspective, I claim as result that modern democracy never released from its role of plebiscitary organizer, since it originally grounds in the fundamental relation that links popular legitimacy to the construction of consent through democratic deliberation. What follows is an overwhelming role played by demagoguery as a proper canon of the political discourse that potentially fosters the plebiscitary will.
The recent crisis of the institutions devoted to organize political consent, that characterizes our post-ideological society, is asking to us for new solutions. Democracy need to challenge the same old compromise between governed and governors, that promoted the democratic rebirth of the passed short century, eventually rewriting the political compact to foster publicness and democratic accountability as well.