Innovating Democracy by New Plebiscitary Voting? Emerging Forms and Urgent Questions

May we have your votes please? In 21st-century democracy this question entails more than it used to. Not only the 'we' asking for votes has been enlarged, the same goes for the 'votes' that are being taken. Citizens may still cast their votes in ballot boxes at election days. But nowadays they can also see them aggregated as digital likes, electronic thumbs-up and 'clicks' of various sorts in the periods between election days. The people initiating these votations can be other private actors or parties with an institutionalized stake in the political system. The votations may be directed at elites that operate within the political system or at issues or topics in the public domain. While conceptual stretching of the concept of voting is not uncommon (think of 'voting with our feet', 'voting with our purses', et cetera), we limit ourselves here to practices that can be viewed as high-tech variants of 'voting with our hands' (on public and political issues). We argue that such a –constrained– stretch is both justifiable and urgent. New practices of voting are spreading, changing democratic discourse as well as well as democratic opportunity structures. There are important shifts to grasp – as we will do in this paper by way of an empirically-informed typology – and there are urgent questions to pose – as we will do by way of a research agenda. The new voting formats that we explore in this paper are combining longer-existing plebiscitary methods (recall, referendum, initiative, et cetera) with new tools and applications (mostly digital). The voting formats of this ‘new plebiscitary democracy’, as we call it, have one thing in common: the swift aggregation of individual choice signals into a collective 'vox populi'. The underlying logic is: numbers matter – the more declarations of digital support amassed, the stronger the representative claim (cf. Saward). In this sense, the new plebiscitary democracy can be understood, and will be understood in this paper, as a rival to representative democracy as well as deliberative democracy, which have their own ways making representative claims: through political representation or through pluralized citizen gatherings. The question that looms large is what the emerging rival does for the greater democratic good. In which (un)desirable ways does it shake things up?