A century ago, Max Weber had suggested a political project for reforming liberal democracy into a regime he named “plebiscitarian democracy”: a strong Caesarist leader takes all responsibility for the future of the country while executive and legislative bodies are turned into his administration. He towers over the political system and draws democratic legitimacy directly from the people whose function is limited to acclaiming at regular elections and plebiscites.

Today’s Russia is almost a textbook example of a plebiscitarian regime. The legitimacy of the leader is constantly produced through opinion polls, plebiscitarian elections, and literal plebiscites, so that there is little doubt both within the country and beyond it that the leader enjoys a wide public support. During this conversation, we will point out several key plebiscitarian technologies deployed by this regime, but also question if this plebiscitarian transformation of democracy shows a possible future for the crippled liberal democracies.

Greg Yudin teaches political philosophy and social theory at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and is a Senior Researcher at Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology at Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Higher School of Economics, Moscow with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of science. Currently he is working on a second PhD degree in Politics at The New School of Social Research in New York.

He studies political theory of democracy with the special emphasis on public opinion polls as a technology of representation and governance in contemporary politics. He is also interested in political and economic anthropology and philosophy of human and social sciences. In 2019, he gave series of talks in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, all linked to his ongoing project Politics of Polls: Theories and Practices of Plebiscitarian Democracy.

His book Public Opinion: The Power of Numbers was published in Russian by The European University Press in 2020. He has also recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Javnost (The Public) on Russian public sphere (Issue 1, 2020). In 2020, he edited a monograph in Russian Living in Debt: Moral Economy of Debt and Credit in Everyday Life of Communities in Russia (Saint-Tikhon University Press). He is a regular contributor to Vedomosti and Republic.