Leadership, plebiscitarism and disintermediation: the challenge of populist democracy.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the different paths and the different role of leadership in the transformation from party democracy to leader democracy and audience democracy. Regarding this topic we will consider the concept of plebiscitarism, the different ways in which this process develops, and the relationship between leadership and democracy in contemporary societies. The relationship between populism and leadership plays a key role in the reconfiguration of political representation in the perspective of personalisation of politics. It is certainly worth reiterating that not every process of personalization and not every new political cleavage can be linked to populism. Regarding populist personalization it is necessary not only to make an appeal to the people and to oppose the “pure people” to the “corrupt elite”, neither an anti-establishment strategy of mobilization during the electoral campaigns, but it needs the emergence of a particular vision of democracy in which anti-elitism is combined with anti-pluralism. Within the wider process of disintermediation that modifies the bond between voters and institutions, populism takes the form of a politics of “unpolitics" and it seems to be a particular declination of plebiscitarism that is not the same of personalization in liberal-democracies and neither the same of the charismatic personalization in the Weberian perspective. Although a large part of the literature on populism tends to equate the populist leadership with the charismatic one, there is however a more recent questioning of the overlapping of the two phenomena. If political personalization modifies the linkage between people and institutions, then the effects of populism on representative democracy are different from those of the transition from party democracy to leader democracy as a development of the Weberian and Schumpeterian perspective.