‘What's wrong with contemporary democracy?’ It is with this question that Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti – the former, reader in Modern European Politics at the University of Cambridge, the latter, associate professor in Political Theory at CUNY – open their research work on technopopulism.
It is undoubtedly the question of the century, as a quick reading of their bibliography shows, which is striking for the huge number of texts produced in the last 30 years that are devoted to the theme of the crisis of democracy. The book sets itself the ambitious goal of developing a set of categories for understanding this crisis, looking mainly at the Western European democracies. Their starting point is that democracy has not been ‘ended’, ‘killed’ or ‘disrupted’ – as the titles of some recent books imply – but has changed at a profound level due to the transformation in the logic of political competition within democratic regimes. With the almost complete disappearance of the ideological left/right divide, competition has been replaced by a new political logic in which candidates for elected office compete primarily in the name of the people as a whole or in the name of an ability to transform popular will into public policies. Populism and technocracy have thus almost completely replaced the right and left ideological poles along which contemporary democratic politics was structured.
The authors define populism and technocracy as ‘modes of political action’ that, far from being specific features of some political actors, over time have become constitutive elements of a ‘new political grammar’ that has come to condition the behaviour of all political actors in contemporary democracies. Furthermore, and more importantly, within this new political logic, the popular will of populism and the competence of technocracy are not opposed to each other, but are deeply connected. Both share ‘an unmediated conception of the common good’ (p. 3, authors’ italics) opposing themselves to the mediated system of party democracy. The authors’ key thesis is that the category that best captures the transformations of democratic regimes since the 1990s is ‘technopopulism’, defined as ‘an organizing logic of electoral competition based on the combination of populist and technocratic discursive tropes and modes of political organization’ (p. 17). Their analytical perspective is therefore organizational, the concept of technopopulism does not refer to an ideology or simple discursive strategy: it affects the concrete way in which political actors organize and act.
The book is divided into a first part dedicated to the definition of the concept, starting from the definitions of populism and technocracy, and a second part on the presentation of some empirical cases of technopopulist political logic, followed by three chapters delves deeper into its historical origins, consequences and normative implications.
The authors’ definitional exercise is very interesting and useful, both from a heuristic point of view (just think of the hundreds of attempts to define the concept of populism in the literature) and because it offers an original lens through which to read five cases of technopopulism: New Labour in the UK, the Five Star Movement and the Lega in Italy, La République En Marche! in France and Podemos in Spain.
Three of these varieties are defined as ‘pure cases’ of technopopulism, because their political offer is a clear synthesis of an appeal to the people and expertise, while the other two are ‘hybrid cases’ because they remain products of a more ideological logic but have been forced to adopt some elements of technopopulism. Among the ‘pure’ cases is the New Labour party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1994–2010), defined as ‘technopopulism through the party’, standing both for the people as a whole and for a depoliticization of policy making (which, according to the authors, is the essence of New Labour's Third Way). The second pure case is the Five Star Movement, which the authors refer to as a ‘technopopulism through the electoral base’, in which the well-known populist traits are combined with the technocratic strain, e.g. Grillo and Casaleggio's frequent appeals to competence and expertise. The third pure case is the ‘technopopulism through the leader’ of Emmanuel Macron. His La République en Marche! operates the synthesis between populist and technocratic elements by entirely focusing on the personal characteristics of Macron itself.
Equally interesting are the hybrid cases of technopopulism that maintain a strong relationship with ideological political logic. On the one hand, left-wing technopopulism, with the example of Podemos that started as a populist movement and over time adopted technocratic traits, such as the emphasis on common sense as a form of popular expertise. On the other, the technopopulism of the extreme right, with the example of Salvini's Lega and his restyling of the party through an escalation of both the populist element and technocratic features, such as his conception of politics as a purely technical activity to solve ordinary people's day-to-day problems.
It is this analysis of hybrid cases that draws our attention to the relationship between ideological and technopopulist political logic. The authors devote a chapter to the origins of technopopulism, identifying them in the overcoming of the right−left ideological axis. Their thesis is that technopopulism derives from a disconnection between society and politics and, more precisely, from the gradual disappearance of mechanisms of mediation between them, starting with political parties. To explain how ideological political logic has given way to technopopulist logic, Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti adopt a historical methodological approach, which they say avoids the language of dependent and independent variables: ‘we believe that in its search for “causal adequacy”, political science has become too ahistorical. We need more history in political science, in order to explain why things happen when they do. More specifically, we need more history in the study of populism and technocracy’ (p. 93). They thus identify three historical phases. The first (1890–1965) is marked by the emergence of ideological politics and party regulated conflicts, the second (1965–1989) is a period of transition during which the social bases for partisan political conflicts were progressively undermined and the third (1990–2020) marks the emergence of technopopulist political logic. In the third phase the structural factors that determined the unmediated relationship between society and politics were already in place, while two conjunctural factors, the end of the Cold War and the economic recession of 2008–2011 gave the coup de grace to ideological party politics. Their case studies of Italy, France and the UK are therefore reread through the capacity of new (or re-newed) political forces to rely upon the synthesis of technocracy and populism for the mobilization of voters.
According to the authors, technopopulism as the new structuring logic of contemporary democratic politics has internal and external consequences. The internal consequences affect electoral competition, and include (a) an increasing new conflictuality towards those who express any dissent in relation to the leadership's ability (and expertise) to speak in the name of the people; and (b) a ‘desubstantialization’ of public policies in spite of the rhetoric of the ‘politics of doing’. Whereas the external consequences concern: (a) a (rather paradoxical) democratic discontent, given that contemporary populism and technocracy arise as the overcoming of mediated politics for the realization of a better quality of democratic representation; and (b) a dangerous process of ‘new authoritarianism’ as a response to the increasing deficit in democratic legitimacy.
There is no doubt, at this point in the book's analysis, that for the two authors the rise of technopopulism undermines the quality of democratic regimes, also because it has the capacity to take multiple forms as demonstrated in the analysis of the management of the coronavirus pandemic. They thus devote the last part of their work to reflections on the normative problems that technopopulist political logic brings about and to possible (desirable) remedies. The latter, according to Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti, are revival and renewal of party democracy through new forms of partisanship and political organization.
This is undoubtedly an ambitious work, which makes considerable progress in studies on the transformations of contemporary democracies. However, precisely because it is a meticulous work, one would have expected a more precise distinction between technopopulism as a ‘new logic of political action’ and as a ‘new logic of electoral political action’ (or competition). This creates some misunderstanding in the analysis of the empirical cases, also because these five parties were also in government, and so the distinction between these two different political logics really matters.
Furthermore, also in relation to the empirical cases of technopopulism, perhaps more weight should be given to the transformations brought about by the digitalization of politics. Indeed now the organizing logic of contemporary democratic politics strongly depends – for at least three of the five varieties of technopopulism analysed in the book – on the digital plebiscitarian means to which party leaders have access.
Finally, I regrettably have to point out that there are a number of errors in the admittedly extensive bibliography. However this lack of attention does not undermine the laudable innovative attempt to conceptualize the phenomenon of technopopulism and in so doing understand the present crisis of our representative democracies.
