Exploring Plebiscitary Leader Democracy and Its Adaptability in the Modern Society

Abstract

With the emergence of plebiscitary leadership worldwide, research concerning the practice of plebiscitary leader democracy has caught political scientists attention. The research has mainly focused on the threats posed on modern democracy by plebiscitary leader democracy. To address the concerns over this threat, this paper explores the adaptability of plebiscitary leader democracy in modern society. This paper adopts literature research and historical analysis as its research methods and mainly uses Google Scholar as a platform to gather research works from the year 2010 to 2023, through which plebiscitary leader democracy, direct democracy and plebiscitary leadership are used as keywords. This paper analyzed more than 15 research papers to conduct analysis and concludes that the adaptability of plebiscitary leader democracy in the modern world is a weak one mainly for two reasons - one is that plebiscitary leader democracy cannot adequately and truly represent peoples will through direct democracy as it claims, the other is that the strong plebiscitary leadership opens the possibility to the personalization, centralization, and discretion of power.