Populism and Crisis of Representation

Abstract

Starting from the recent Italian constitutional referendum that reduced the number of representatives by a third, the essay focuses on the relationship between the crisis of democratic constitutionalism and the affirmation of populism, highlighting worrying correlations with the consolidation of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes. The analysis of further proposals for constitutional revision currently under discussion in the Parliament confirms the trend to strengthen governability against the representative principle, also through the introduction of certain institutes of participative democracy. Analysing this tendency in the context of the more general crisis of representation and its root causes, the essay reaffirms the need for representative democracy as the only way to safeguard a real democracy, able to manage the complexity of the demands of the contemporary world. It is therefore appropriate to avoid the false democracy of the instruments of participative democracy, more easily manipulated by the new elites beyond the political parties, the institutional channels of popular participation in the determination of national politics. From this perspective, even the idea of the Net as a telematic agora and the place where e-democracy would assert itself reveals its fallacy, being unable to guarantee the democratic nature of choices and the conscious formation of political decisions.