The authoritarian side of representative democracy

There is a prevailing opinion among theorists that representative democracy, if defined in a minimalist (Przeworski 1999; 2018) or electoral way, dangerously thins down the notion of popular sovereignty and leaves a wide room for the potentially authoritarian practices of political manipulation, the aestheticization of the public sphere, the passivation of citizens, thereby "disfiguring" representative democracy (Urbinati 2014; 2019). While there have been innovative attempts at reconceptualizing popular power as "ocular democracy" (Green 2010), "monitory democracy" (Keane 2009), "open democracy" (Landemore 2020), or "counter-democracy" (Rosanvallon 2008), surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature authoritarian practices within representative democracy, and almost none to the historical forms these practices took. The proposed paper aims to contribute to filling this theoretical gap by resorting to the Weberian notion of "plebiscitary leader democracy" (PLD)(Pakulski and Körösényi 2012; Körösényi, Illés, and Gyulai 2020), which sees democratic and authoritarian components are inextricably intertwined in leader-centered settings of representative democracy. In PLD – contrary to party democracy – there is a direct relationship between leaders and followers; this relationship is asymmetrical, which leaves ample room for manipulation; the emotional side of politics is widely utilized; and representation has both a strong acting for and symbolic component (Pitkin 1967; Urbinati 2019). The paper’s main contribution is mapping the manifestations of that leader-centered representative setting since Weber’s time, distinguishing historical forms within PLD in a similar fashion Bernard Manin (1997) once did with representative government. We claim that, while all historical forms exhibit basic traits of PLD, there are significant variations in the authoritarian practices and the possibilities of popular control in the three historical forms: rally democracy, spectatorship democracy, and post-truth democracy. Each exhibits a different blend of democratic and authoritarian components, influenced by sociological, political, and technological changes – the background the paper also aims to reconstruct. Mapping these types might help us understand the current predicament of representative democracy by providing a historical horizon to interpret the recent populist surge. Additionally, it might also serve as a footnote, written in the spirit of democratic realism (Achen and Bartels 2017; Green 2010; 2016), that argues that authoritarianism is endemic to the leader-follower relationship; therefore, our most realistic critical option in leader-centered representative settings is trying to constrain it, instead of eliminating it.