Abstract
While populism and technocracy have attracted enormous scientific attention in recent years, surprisingly how the two concepts relate to each other has rarely been investigated. Looking at the case of the EU, we investigate how populist parties position themselves in relation to technocracy in general and the technocratic nature of EU institutions in particular. In a first theoretical step, we identify the core elements, modes of governance, and policy output of technocratic governance and use them to derive potential responses of populist parties. In the empirical part, we investigate these aspects of technocracy by applying quantitative and qualitative approaches using the 2019 European election manifestos of 12 populist parties. We show that left- and right-wing populist parties articulate anti-technocratic positions, particularly regarding the core elements of technocratic governance. The concrete technocratic critique differs regarding the respective host ideology. However, within the group of hybrid populist parties, ANO 2011 and GERB appear not to have a critical stance towards technocracy and thus can be classified as technocratic populist parties.
Highlights
It is not the French and their Marine Le Pen, not the Austrians and their Heinz-Christian Strache, not the Hungarians and their Viktor Orbán, and it is not us Germans from the AfD who are driving Europe against the wall, but it is these Brussels technocrats who do it and it is to these people that we are declaring war. (Jörg Meuthen, top candidate of the AfD for the European elections 2019 at the AfD European election campaign kick-off on 06 April 2019 in Offenburg; AfD, 2019a)After 20 years of experience with governance by our political parties, I do not much trust the flowery claims
The first response is a rejection of technocracy because of the antagonism between populism and technocracy regarding their notion of the will of the people, representation, legitimacy, and political authority (Caramani, 2017)
The central research question has been how populist parties react to technocracy in general and to the technocratic nature of the EU in particular
Summary
It is not the French and their Marine Le Pen, not the Austrians and their Heinz-Christian Strache, not the Hungarians and their Viktor Orbán, and it is not us Germans from the AfD who are driving Europe against the wall, but it is these Brussels technocrats who do it and it is to these people that we are declaring war. (Jörg Meuthen, top candidate of the AfD for the European elections 2019 at the AfD European election campaign kick-off on 06 April 2019 in Offenburg; AfD, 2019a). The above-quoted statements of the two populist parties AfD and ANO 2011 point to different perceptions of technocracy: While Jörg Meuthen from the German right-wing populist party AfD is ‘declaring war’ to the Brussels technocrats, Andrej Babiš from ANO 2011 promises to ‘run the state as a firm’ and promotes technocracy and efficiency as the main solution for politics (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019; Havlík, 2019). This raises questions about varieties of populist responses to technocratic governance and whether there are distinct responses depending on the type of populism. The third section presents data and methods, followed by the analysis and the conclusions
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