The Populist Substantialization of Popular Sovereignty

• In Event: Sovereignty, Rule of Law and Democracy Challenges in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

Despite its intention to give politics back to the people, populism in power ends up creating a decisionist leader; despite asserting the priority of the people over institutions, it ends up celebrating the personification of popular sovereignty. The paper teaches this conclusion by focusing on the populist form of representation as embodiment, a strategy that promises to overcome the gap that mandate representation creates between the elected and the people. The paper shows that this solution ends up being worse than the problem it seeks to solve. Criticizing populism’s outcome does not entail abandoning the normative value of popular sovereignty or disregarding the populist diagnosis of the malfunctions and political corruption of representative democracy. The problem is that populism in power (left or right) doesn’t solve the decline of democratic legitimacy and doesn’t deliver political power back to the people. It is neither properly popular nor pluralistic, and this is because it continues to court the myth of the substabstalization of sovereign.

Author

• Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University