The New Expression of Plebiscitary Democracy in the Age of ICTs ꟷ Towards a Research Agenda

One example. In May 2018, the Spanish left-wing political party Podemos, organized a 'party referendum', as they called it, on its leadership. Pablo Iglesias, the party's outspoken leader, and his life partner Irene Montero, the party’s parliamentary spokeswoman, had purchased a relatively luxurious €600,000 home with swimming pool and guest house. This was fiercely criticized. In reaction, Iglesias and Montero accepted an unplanned vote of confidence, organized via the party's website. Although some framed it as a digital ‘referendum', the procedure could also be likened to a digital recall. The couple ultimately survived the vote, on 28 May 2018, after winning 68.4 per cent of nearly 190,000 votes cast. This is just one example of the emerging new plebiscitary democracy, which is combining longer-existing methods (recall, referendum, initiative) with new tools and applications (mostly digital). To better understand the large variety of emerging formats, a heuristally valuable matrix of generic types will be developed in this paper. The new plebiscitary democracy is a sprawling phenomenon, which, as this paper argues, needs more systematic research. The paper ultimately outlines a research agenda, based on the explorative review of new plebiscitary formats, which all have one thing in common: the swift aggregation of individual choice signals (increasingly digital) into a collective 'vox populi'. To the extent that new types of votations are levelled at political elites and public issues, they are part of the investigation. Beyond party websites, various other platforms serve to collect and amass (electronic) signs of public (dis)approval. These can be websites originally built for another purpose that also facilitate the count of checks, likes, thumbs-up, or equivalent signs of support. These can also be social media platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and Instagram, which - in addition to many other things - facilitate the quantification of support for issues. The underlying logic is: numbers matter – the more declarations of public support amassed, the stronger the ‘representative claim’ (cf. Saward). In the process, the new plebiscitary democracy is changing democratic discourse - understood here as a contraction of language and practice – as well as democratic opportunity structures. The new plebiscitary democracy impacts the established system of electoral democracy in ways not yet well-understood. Urgent questions in relation to this are part of the research agenda presented.