E-Populism: a Tension Between Ideals and Reality

Populism and representation are closely related as the former emerges to overcome the limits of the latter, and the literature generally understands populism as an alarm, or as a danger for democracy. While this approach fits best with right-wing extremists, it misses to fully understand those populist phenomena that have emerged propounding participation as a response to the limits of representation. This is the case of the 5 Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, a political subject that introduced participatory dynamics at territorial and virtual levels. What is the relationship between populism and democratic innovations within a populist political phenomenon? How does this relationship change with the development from movement to party? What differences can be traced between the central-national and the base-territorial levels in the implementation of participatory tools? This paper responds to these questions with two comparisons: the former happens to be at the local level, by means of the analysis of the way participatory budgeting has been introduced by the M5S in two different locations, compared to similar experiments run by two other political parties; the latter examines the peculiarities of the participatory practices within the M5S between local and central level. Two cross-cutting analytical categories are: the quality of the e-democracy instruments at local and central level and the intensity of the democratic innovations in different phases of Party institutionalization (opposition-government). The resulting evidence shades light on the internalized paradox of participatory innovations within a populist party.