Abstract
Most studies of technocratic populism have focused on democracies under stress (e.g., Italy, Czech Republic). This article builds on and extends these studies by analyzing a hybrid regime—post-Soviet Georgia—and argues that technocratic populism in this context is utilized as a façade to cover authoritarian and oligarchic tendencies, while suspending (or reversing) democratization efforts. The state apparatus is weaponized against current and potential political opponents. Ideology is irrelevant, loyalty is key, and passivity is encouraged. The government aims to chip away at institutional checks and balances, and to demobilize the public by undermining confidence in the country’s representative institutions while increasing dependence on experienced personalities, the ‘can do experts.’ The result is most often a stable partial-reform equilibrium. We illustrate this argument with evidence from Georgia, where Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in the country, came to power in 2012 and, despite not holding any official position in the government since 2013, has run the state as a firm.
Highlights
Managing ‘the state as a firm,’ and using expertise to bypass accountability, is emerging as a respectable method of governance that has become known as ‘technocratic populism’ (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019)
This article aims to do both; this study asks: How and under what circumstances does technocratic populism emerge in hybrid regimes? What are its principal characteristics, and what strategies do technocratic populists use to stay in power and govern? Drawing on evidence from Georgia—a hybrid regime that, since 2012, has witnessed the gradual emergence of technocratic populism—we address these questions and show that hybrid regimes offer fertile soil for technocratic populism to take root because party systems are under-institutionalized, the nature of governance is elitist (March, 2017) and its quality is poor
This study examines the logic of technocratic populism in a hybrid regime, and focuses on Georgia—a country with a political system that has been variously characterized as ‘feckless pluralism’ and ‘dominant power politics’ (Berglund, 2014)
Summary
Managing ‘the state as a firm,’ and using expertise to bypass accountability, is emerging as a respectable method of governance that has become known as ‘technocratic populism’ (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019). While the rise of modern populism has been extensively studied in the scholarly literature (Caiani & Graziano, 2019; Canovan, 1999; Grzymala-Busse, 2019; Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2012; Pappas, 2019; Stanley, 2008; Weyland, 2020), and there are several studies of technocracy (Bickerton & Accetti, 2017; Caramani, 2017; De la Torre, 2013), technocratic populism is still relatively underexplored (see Guasti & Buštíková, 2020) Building on this emerging literature, we understand technocracy and populism as two alternatives challenging representative, party-based democracy (Caramani, 2017). The final section summarizes the analysis and discusses its implications for democratization
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