Populism between direct democracy and the technological myth

Abstract

In recent years, the scientific debate on populism has experienced a new momentum: on the one hand, the emergence of new populisms even in Western democracies and on the other hand, disagreement among scholars on the definition of populism. In this context, new trends have emerged-such as those concerning the link between populism and technology-along with the need to revise the traditional study paradigms, which are often difficult to operationalise. The transformation of the political sphere appears to be strongly interconnected with the digital media landscape. If the new forms of communication are the cause or the effect of processes, such as the personalisation of leadership, the verticalisation of political organisations, the presidentialisation of political parties, or the social delegitimisation of the old "intermediate bodies", these forms should be the subject of ongoing research. At the same time, a very simplistic storyline tries to overlap the rise of neo-populist parties with their use of communication technologies. A quality that is common to the many different populisms is an appeal to the use of direct democracy as a tool to empower citizens. Populism itself is sometimes portrayed as almost synonymous with direct democracy. At the same time, direct democracy is used by populists as a critique of the lack of participation in representative democracy and the need to make it more participatory. In this perspective, technology becomes a tool (and a storyline) to facilitate the use of direct democracy and the rise of a new form of "hyper-representation". At the same time, concepts such as efficiency, privatisation, short-termism, newism, and meritocracy are keywords successfully used by populist leaders, technocracy élites and neo-liberal political leaders. In other words, we can highlight a strange meeting between technological storytelling about direct democracy and technocracy myths. Even among the new populist parties, the technopopulists appear to represent an important category, whose peculiarities can easily be put into evidence using some empirical tools (such as content analysis). The aim of this article is to investigate the relationships between technocracy, direct democracy's storytelling and hyper-representation as a distinctive characteristic of neo-populisms.

Techno-sovereignism: the political rationality of contemporary Italian populism

“…It rather means that by using critically the approach outlined above we may be able to develop insights into the premises and workings of a "new" populist subject, which could be possibly generalized. In fact, although the findings presented below in the third and fourth sections partly converge with the extant literature on populism (e.g., Mudde 2004;Natale and Ballatore 2014;Pratt and Miao 2017;De Blasio and Sorice 2018), the remainder of the article brings to the fore fine-grained aspects of the Italian case that suggest, from a comparative perspective, considering similar features in other populist assemblages.…”

“…The first is analytical: it could provide insights into how the Italian populist assemblage rationalized its genetic tensions translating them into relatively coherent political programs (Rose 2017). This has the potential to shed light on some constitutive dynamics, functioning diagrams and implicit frictions characterising other "new" populist alliances, and namely those characterized by a combination of right-wing and technocratic populist elements (Caramani 2017;Jansen 2017;Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2018;De Blasio and Sorice 2018). The second reason is normative and strategic: drawing out the Yellow-Green governmentality could help identify new targets for progressive anti-authoritarian political contestation, pointing to forms of critical disentanglement from the populist reach.…”

Platform Party between Digital Activism and Hyper-Leadership: The Reshaping of the Public Sphere

“…Within this process of transforming democracy, plebiscitarism marks the overcoming of collective actors as intermediaries of democracy, in fact substantiating the democratic method in the mere possibility for voters to choose, and legitimise by voting, the leaders who govern them (Schumpeter, 2003). The challenges to the representation and role of political parties arise in discussion of the political representation proper to liberal democracies, opening the way for different developments of plebiscitarism, from leader democracy to the most radical forms of populist audience democracy (De Blasio & Sorice, 2018;Urbinati, 2019). In the changing models of representation in the post 'party democracy era,' the electoral dimension alone does not guarantee the legitimacy of democracy but only enables the 'rule of the majority,' underestimating the forms of trust, identity, and political project which comprise democracy.…”

Best Practices of the Social Innovations in the Framework of the E-Government Evolution

“…cybersecurity, technopopulism, de-politicization, de-bureaucratisation, smart governance, open governance; nonmediated governance, public data monopolization etc.) (De Blasio and Sorice, 2018;Giddens, 2009;Florida, 2010;Meier and Bolivar, 2016;Paulin, 2019;Shires and Smeets, 2017;Zuboff, 2019).…”