The paper’s starting point will be my recent article published in French on "The French Republic, the Referendum and the Plebiscitary Democracy of Max Weber" (in Jus Politicum: see www.juspoliticum.com/The-French-Fifth-Republic-the.html) . It will begin with a reconstruction of the model of “plebiscitary democracy” mentioned by Max Weber in his late sociological and political writings, and then proceed with a discussion of the two most famous historical applications of this model, namely the Weimar Republic and the French Fifth Republic. A particular effort will be put on evaluating the analogy between the Weberian model and the French regime installated by De Gaulle in 1958 not only at its beginning but also nowadays, in view of its evolving practices and of the various constitutional reforms.This will lead to the core of the paper, dedicated to the more general question of whether Weber was right or not to regard plebiscitary democracy as the future of mass democracies under the influence of universal suffrage and democratization. Contemporary trends such as the personnalisation and “presidentialisation” of politics through charismatic-like mediatic leaders formally or de facto chosen by the people look indeed as a confirmation of Weber’prediction, while other major transformations discussed in the literature such as the scattering of leadership into governance patterns or the advent of opinion democracy may not be in line with this model. The paper will conclude with an attempt to characterize the present phase undergone by established democracies. Alternatively I could propose a paper entitled “Diagnostics about popular input in government: a review of most ancient to most recent literature by democratic theorists and comparatists”.
