The populist challenge to representative democracy: Chavist Venezuela and the Five Star Movement

Abstract

This paper is about populism as a phenomenon and it highlights the legitimacy crisis that characterizes liberal democracy in contemporary societies. However, according to the hypothesis presented here, the concept of populism lacks a normative approach capable of detecting and emphasizing the risks involved in this type of representation, in which the bond between rulers and ruled is exposed to a lower degree of reflexivity and criticism. In order to test this initial hypothesis, two case study are presented: the Bolivarian Movement, in Venezuela, and the Five Star Movement, in Italy.