Executive Dominance, Plebiscitarian Politics, Party Decline and the Populist Challenge to Democratic Representation

When recent literature on populism has focused on its institutional drivers, it has often done so rather abstractly, treating liberal democracy and its pluralist logic as general and abstract rather than institutionally diverse and multi-dimensional (eg. Mudde and Kaltwasser’s Populism in Europe and the Americas, 2012). In this paper I argue that our attempts to understand the recent explosion of right-wing populism in the West will be improved by taking account of the influence that the growth of executive power relative to legislative power, and an attendant increase in plebiscitarian leadership styles by government leaders, has had on this explosion. Contemporary right-wing populism responds to politicians’ alleged inability to represent the people’s will with increasingly plebiscitarian appeals. Is the reality and negative public reception of executive dominance (ED) partly responsible for the populist response? For example, does ED shape the responses in performative dimensions of populist politics (Moffitt 2016) in a way that enhances its popular appeal while effectively reducing the relevance of much conventional legislative representation? Does mainstream government leaders’ utilization of plebiscitarian tactics and appeals facilitate a plebiscitarian populist response? Exploring this set of related questions requires that we map and begin to theorize the linkages between executive dominance, changed public perceptions of the decision-making landscape and viable policy options, and the increased legitimacy of plebiscitarian populist responses to contemporary democratic deficits and the exercise of elite power. Doing so should take into account how party candidates, elected officials, partisan citizens and the media adapt to this new environment of representation. If parties are increasingly instruments of plebiscitarian leaders, should we be surprised if voters see plebiscitarian populist demagogues as antidotes to parties’ increasing decline? Perhaps the relationship between ED and plebiscitarian appeals posited here is both a cause and an effect of the public perception of a decline in political parties’ functioning as effective instruments of political representation. With reference to recent experiences in the UK, USA and Canada, this paper will provide some provisional conceptualization and hypotheses concerning the links between executive dominance, plebiscitarian politics, party decline and the new wave of populist challenge. In doing so I hope to offer a better appreciation of key institutional nodes in a broader system of contemporary representational practices that facilitates populist politics. My analysis will take advantage of recent contributions to both representational theory (particularly Saward’s) and theorizations of populism.