, as a practical matter, facilitate or frustrate alternative outcomes.169 In general, as Schmitt recognized, the people’s ability to express itself directly is drastically limited. It is confined to the propositions that the organizers of the referendum put before it. It can dispose but not propose.170 It is impossible for the people to state its will with nuance or qualification. It cannot reconsider and revise. Even these crude expressions of its will may be rendered only infrequently.
These doubts are reinforced by the historical association of plebiscitary democracy with totalitarian government. Napoleon is credited with developing the plebiscite as a prop for authoritarianism and the techniques of electoral manipulation have, if anything, been radically advanced with the advent of electronic mass communication.171 The constitution of Haiti, adopted in 1987 after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, actually states that “[g]eneral elections to amend the Constitution by referendum are strictly forbidden.”172 This kind of criticism, however, (indeed any of the criticisms that have been discussed for various means of representing the people) must be tempered by our recognition that the people is not a flesh-and-blood entity, much less the bearer of a genuine single psychological will. The perfectly unmediated voice of the people is necessarily a fiction.