Abstract
This article reads the restructuring of European party systems in the 2010s as a transition from cartel to techno-populist parties, with a specific focus on left-populist challengers. Adopting a historical-institutionalist perspective, it demonstrates how a long-term cartelization and particular mode of crisis management after 2008 drove the gradual replacement of the party cartel with a cohabitation of populism and technocratic politics: techno-populism. Although this techno-populist template has been deployed for parties such as Five Star Movement and some right-wing populist outfits, it has usually been left aside for left-wing variants. This article investigates two techno-populist subtypes from the left: Corbynism in the United Kingdom and Podemos in Spain. The former took place within a cartel party (‘intra-party’), while the latter occurred from outside the party cartel (‘extra-party’). Although such party cartelization cuts across cases, the rise of Corbynism and Podemos took place under different institutional conditions: different electoral systems, different European Union membership and different dynamics of party competition on the left. The article concludes with the observation that rather than an anomaly, the presence of techno-populist tropes in and outside of parties and across institutional settings indicates the pervasiveness of these logics in contemporary European party politics.
Highlights
The aftermath of the 2008 crisis saw the reintroduction of a curious term into the English lexicon: ‘techno-populism.’ Launched by political scientists Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi in 2018, the term was previously deployed in the early 1990s by the political scientist Carlos de la Torre to characterise a series of Latin American politicians (de la Torre, 2013)
The technocratic traits of Corbynism and Podemos are visible in the adoption of a language of expertise and technical competence and their enthusiasm for what Paulo Gerbaudo has styled the ‘digital party’ (Gerbaudo, 2018) de la Torre (2013) identifies a figure that is apt to capture the technocratic nature of both political projects: the ‘post-neoliberal expert.’
This article has emphasized the complementarity of populism and technocracy through a comparative study of two recent techno-populist experiences: Podemos and Corbynism
Summary
The aftermath of the 2008 crisis saw the reintroduction of a curious term into the English lexicon: ‘techno-populism.’ Launched by political scientists Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi in 2018, the term was previously deployed in the early 1990s by the political scientist Carlos de la Torre to characterise a series of Latin American politicians (de la Torre, 2013). Following the adoption of a partial primary system in 2014 under the leadership of Ed Miliband, an intra-party space was opened up for a left-populist takeover in the Labour Party From these comparative historical experiences, we posit that a radical alternative to the party cartel is more likely to adopt an extra-party character under conditions of fragmented party competition. While there are additional contextual and individual-level factors that would provide an even more detailed explanation, we argue that the three conditions outlined here (the dynamics of party competition, type of EU membership and electoral barriers) offer a minimal institutionalist account for the ‘internal–external’ modes of populism in our two cases
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