Plebiscitary Leader Democracy in Theory and Practice: Weber and his Unconscious Disciples

Populism and populist leadership has spread from Latin-America and East- and Central Europe to classic Western Democracies. Radical and populist parties, movements and politicians have moved from marginality into the mainstream not only in Austria (Jörg Haider and the Freedom Party), Italy (Silvio Berlusconi, Beppe Grillo), Greece (Syriza), Spain (Podemos), but in core states of liberal democracy like the UK (the Brexit leaders), USA (Donald Trump), France (Marine Le Pen). The emergence of populism challenges the prevailing public and social values, the existing institutional order, and liberal democracy itself. While this new trend and its impact is usually discussed from a normative liberal democratic viewpoint, (hence the focus is on what normative / liberal democratic criteria populism and populist regimes fail to meet, but less attention is paid on how populist politics and regimes actually work), this paper changes the theoretical perspective and offer a realist theory and conceptual frame for the analysis. It argues that Max Weber’s concept of leader democracy provides an appropriate means to theorize about this new empirical development (c.f. Manin 1997; Körösényi 2005; Green 2010; Pakulski and Körösényi 2012).[1] This paper aims to understand, describe and analyse the emerging empirical trend in leadership by (re)constructing and applying the theory of leader democracy. Leader democracy is understood by Weber as a routinized version of charismatic authority, therefore it can be characterized as a combination of charismatic and legal-rational authority. Drawing on Weber, the paper unfolds a model of leader democracy to offer analytical means for comparing different types of political leadership and regimes. The objectives of the paper are the followings. (1) First, it aims to reconstruct Weber’s theory of leader democracy, relying heavily on Weber’s texts. (2) Second, the paper argues that, due to the ambiguities in Weber’s account of leader democracy (Baehr 2008; Hennis 2000; Kalyvas 2002), two different readings are possible: an “optimistic” and a “pessimistic” one. The paper unfolds these two interpretations, namely a liberal-pluralist and a populist-plebiscitarian type of leader democracy as ideal-typical models. (3) Third, it argues that the model of leader democracy, and its two versions, might be a useful means for comparative research on political leadership and regimes. It illustrates with empirical examples (or short case studies) that while the liberal-pluralist type can be used as an appropriate theoretical frame for analysing personalization tendencies that marked liberal democracies since the 1980’s (Manin 1997), the populist-plebiscitarian type of leader democracy is useful for theorizing on the emergence of populist leadership and politics occurred in most recent times. While the former reading might be compatible with liberal democratic theory, the latter challenges it. [1] The paper aims to avoid the pitfalls of liberal democratic theory, first, its teleological approach (O’Donnell 1996; Levitsky and Way 2002), second, its concealment of the basic contradiction between liberalism and democracy (c.f. O’Donell and Schmitter 1986), which makes difficult for it a realist account of the populism.