Citizen Democracy. New Politics in New Participation Models

The aim of this chapter is to study the relationship between populism and the tools of direct democracy and/or deliberative and participatory democracy. The direct plea to people is not exclusively used by the so-called populist groups. However, the populist political actors use the direct plea to citizens in order to shape a transformative project, and on this it builds artificially a broad and disarticulated people, which is able to hold together people of different social categories, cultural heritage, professional experience and profoundly different economical conditions. Starting from such considerations, paying particular attention to the Italian case, this article concentrates on how the populist parties use the tools of direct, deliberative and participatory democracy in different ways. The intention is to propose a comparative interpretation based on a dual level of classification. On the one hand the partition related to the tools used by the populist parties (referendum, inclusive candidate and leader selections, participatory budgets, on line consultations, etc.) and on the other hand the distinction in respect to the political-institutional level of their application (local, national or supranational). The aim is that of pointing out the different modes through which the main Italian populist parties use such political options and what differences are observable among them.