Populism and plebiscitarianism 2.0: How Podemos used digital platforms for organization and decision-making

Abstract

Using the Spanish party Podemos as a case study, this article opens up a dialogue between researchers in the fields of populist communication and the digitization of political parties. Research has persuasively shown how the participatory promise of digital parties often degenerated into “plebiscitarianism 2.0.” However, partly because of the mutual disengagement between these fields, the mismatch between promise and reality remains poorly understood. This article argues that, in the case of Podemos, this gap arises from the party’s populist project to turn widespread public disaffection into political power—a project that, as populism typically does, involved the use of plebiscitarian linkages and, therefore, was contradictory to the promise of promoting participatory democracy. By bridging the gap between populism and digital party research, this article calls attention to how populist actors use digital media not only to bypass traditional gatekeepers but also to replace political parties with online plebiscites.