The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy

Eri Bertsou, Daniele Caramani, Eri Bertsou, Daniele Caramani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000043600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book represents the first comprehensive study of how technocracy currently challenges representative democracy and asks how technocratic politics undermines democratic legitimacy. How strong is its challenge to democratic institutions?

The book offers a solid theory and conceptualization of technocratic politics and the technocratic challenge is analyzed empirically at all levels of the national and supra-national institutions and actors, such as cabinets, parties, the EU, independent bodies, central banks and direct democratic campaigns in a comparative and policy perspective. It takes an in-depth analysis addressing elitism, meritocracy, de-politicization, efficiency, neutrality, reliance on science and distrust toward party politics and ideologies, and their impact when pitched against democratic responsiveness, accountability, citizens' input and pluralist competition. In the current crisis of democracy, this book assesses the effects of the technocratic critique against representative institutions, which are perceived to be unable to deal with complex and global problems. It analyzes demands for competent and responsible policy making in combination with the simultaneous populist resistance to experts.

The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, political theory, policy analysis, multi-level governance as well as practitioners working in bureaucracies, media, think-tanks and policy making.

Part I

Concepts and theory

1 Technocracy and political theory

Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti

Introduction: a critique of classical and contemporary arguments

The notion of technocracy is at the heart of contemporary political discourse and debates. At the height of the Eurozone’s economic crisis, in November 2011, both the Italian and the Greek prime ministers were replaced by figures widely identified as technocrats (Donadio 2011, Verney and Bosco 2013). In debates over the European Union’s supposed “democratic deficit”, its institutions are often described as technocratic (Føllesdal and Hix 2006, Habermas 2015, Majone 1998, Moravcsik 2002). Finally, in the discussions that preceded the 2016 vote for “Brexit”—but also in many of the national elections that have taken place since then, such as in the United States and in France—the choice has often been framed in terms of an opposition between nationalist “populism” on the one hand and liberal “technocracy” on the other (Bickerton 2016, Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2015, Caramani 2017, Giugni and Rubinelli 2015, Invernizzi Accetti 2016, Leonard 2017).

Underpinning most of these references to technocracy is the assumption that the latter consists of an appeal to expertise as the basis for political legitimacy. Academic definitions of the term reflect this assumption. In his seminal 1969 text on the subject, Jean Meynaud defined technocracy as “a system of government in which technically trained experts rule by virtue of their specialized knowledge and position in dominant political and economic institutions” (Meynaud 1969: 31). Along similar lines, in a more contemporary example, Duncan McDonnell and Macro Valbruzzi laid out three requirements for classifying a prime minister or a minister as a technocrat (see also Valbruzzi, Chapter 6 in this volume, on technocratic cabinets). The first was that, at the time of appointment, he or she had never held public office under the banner of a political party. The second was not being a formal member of any party and the third was to have “recognized non-party political expertise, which is directly relevant to the role occupied in government” (McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2014: 657–58).

From such definitions, it follows that there is an irreducible tension between technocracy and democracy. Democracy rests upon a principle of “identity” between the rulers and the ruled, where the “people”—construed as the object of government—are also its subject and are therefore the ultimate basis of political legitimacy (Bobbio 2005, Dahl 1956, Habermas 1989, Kelsen 1929). In contrast, technocracy introduces a quite different principle of legitimacy. The term implies that some people can legitimately rule over others, by virtue of their technical competence or administrative expertise (Centeno 1993, Centeno and Silva 1998, Dargent 2014, Fischer 1990, 2009, Radaelli 1999b).

In this chapter, we do not deny this tension between technocracy and democracy. However, we find that defenders of technocracy today rarely make this tension explicit. Instead, a claim about the complementarity between technocracy and democracy underpins contemporary arguments for technocracy. Technocratic political arrangements are said to bolster a broadly democratic system of government by increasing its “output legitimacy” in specific policy domains (Scharpf 1999). Thus, Claudio Radaelli has drawn a useful distinction between what we call in this chapter the classical arguments for technocracy, those which “advocated for a direct rise to power of experts”, and more contemporary ones, which are “formally respectful of democratic values and institutions” (Radaelli 1999b: 24).

The intention behind these contemporary arguments for technocracy is to carve out spaces for (relatively) autonomous decision making by experts, within a political system that continues to draw its legitimacy from the democratic ideal of “identity” between the rulers and the ruled. The widespread proliferation of “quasi-autonomous agencies” devoted to the regulation of specific areas of policy within the nation states is an example of this (Elgie 2006, Gilardi 2002, Rosanvallon 2011). So too is the delegation of specific policy competences to supranational bodies such as the European Central Bank or the European Commission (Bickerton 2012, 2016, Majone 1994, 1996, Moravcsik 2002).

In this chapter, we argue that despite the often-made claim about complementarity, contemporary arguments for technocracy continue to represent an important challenge to the democratic idea of collective self-rule. They do this by implicitly assuming that the boundaries between the democratic and technocratic areas of decision making are themselves matters of technical expertise. They thereby ultimately end up placing experts—and not the “people”—in the position of sovereign. As a result, the relationship between democracy and technocracy poses once again the question of where ultimate authority resides within a polity. Contemporary claims around complementarity between democracy and expertise elide this more fundamental conflict, which has been an integral part of the development of modern societies and their reliance upon expert knowledge. As Harald Laski put it back in 1931, in a pamphlet entitled “The Limitations of the Expert”, experts should be “on tap, not on top” (Laski 1931). This principle is far easier to formulate in theory than it is to implement in practice. The question of where final authority resides is constantly posed anew by concrete developments and policy innovations, as is clear from the discussion of the EU’s democratic deficit later in the chapter.

To demonstrate this, the chapter proceeds in three parts. In the first, we reconstruct the “classical” argument for technocracy, through an engagement with the work of the author we think has formulated it in the most powerful and long-lasting way: Plato. We show that his argument for empowering philosophers relied on a conflation of two domains that classical Greek political culture had previously kept rigorously separate: that of politics, construed as a domain of “self-realization”, and that of economics, construed as the domain of the satisfaction of material “needs” (Arendt 1958). This conflation allowed Plato to portray politics as a techne—that is, an “art” or a “craft” requiring a specific kind of knowledge. On this basis, Plato could maintain that only those with such knowledge (i.e. those he called philosophers, and what we would probably refer to as experts) should be entitled to rule, independently of whether they obtain the consent of the demos.

In the second part of the chapter, we show that while versions of this “classical” argument for technocracy persist in some circles today, the transfer of power to experts is predominantly justified through an idea of a separation between different policy domains. Whilst some domains should be left to the “people” to decide over democratically, others are, for a variety of reasons, better entrusted to expert decision making. Far from representing an alternative to democracy, technocracy thus complements and enhances democratic legitimacy. In this second part, we show that this argument comes in a variety of guises, and we identify several different criteria that have been put forward for determining how the boundaries between technocratic and democratic policy areas should be drawn. However, we also observe that these different accounts share the common assumption that the boundaries between separate policy areas are themselves a matter of technical expertise, and should therefore not to subject to the dynamics of political contestation. In this way, contemporary arguments for technocracy end up subordinating the democratic exercise of collective self-government to a prior exercise of technical competence, which subverts the chain of authorization commonly associated with democratic politics. We can also see here a clear difference between contemporary instances of empowering technocratic authority and what is more generally referred to as “liberal constitutionalism” (Elster and Slagstad 1988, Holmes 1988). Whilst the latter is concerned with empowering non-majoritarian institutions, these institutions were created as part of a wider constitutional settlement bound up with attempts at enacting popular sovereignty. As Martin Loughlin has put it, the non-majoritarian components of liberalism are best thought of as expressions or explications of the basic principle of popular self-government rather than as limitations or external constraints on this principle (Loughlin 2003).

Contemporary instances of delegating power to technocratic institutions are not part of any such constitutional moment, and their legitimacy rests far more heavily on assumptions about the specific characteristics of certain policy domains.¹ The same applies for distinctions between technocracy and judicial power. There is an element of expertise associated with law, and the practice of courts requires that conflicts are depoliticized and both parties accept the arbitration of the third party (Bickerton 2017, Carr 1995). However, the law itself originates in the deliberation and decisions of elected bodies, such that the boundary between judicial power and technocracy more broadly is clear. As Anthony King put it, judges have become controversial in recent years not because they are seeking to expand their power at the expense of a parliament or an executive, but because politicians have invited judges to make controversial decisions (2015: 273).

The third part of the chapter makes the case that this contemporary way of arguing for technocracy is more insidious for democratic political systems than the classical arguments advanced by Plato and his successors. The Platonic argument for technocracy construes it as a utopian ideal, which can function as the ground for a partisan political project within a democratic political regime (as was the case, for instance, with the “Technocracy” movement of the 1930s in the United States). In contrast, contemporary arguments for technocracy undermine the very space in which a public contestation of the relative merits of technocracy and democracy could take place, by defining a priori the objective boundaries of their respective spheres of legitimacy.

The classical argument for technocracy

It is generally accepted that Plato’s argument for the idea that philosophers ought to rule relied on a prior conception of politics as a techne: a term now commonly translated as “art” or “craft”, but which has a broader significance in the context of Plato’s work (Harvey 2009, Wadia 1987, Wild 1963). Its two key features are the idea of an activity oriented towards a specific goal (ergon) and the assumption that this requires a specific kind of knowledge (episteme). The most common examples Plato refers to are medicine—the goal of which is supposed to be “health”, and the knowledge required to attain it, “knowledge of the human body”—and what he calls “shepherdship”, namely the herding of sheep, which requires knowledge about the “nature of sheep and their needs” (Bambrough 1963). Analogously, Plato assumed that the goal of politics is the “herding of human beings” (The Statesman: 267c). The knowledge required for that was the “knowledge of human nature” and its “needs”.

On this basis, Plato reaches the notorious conclusion that philosophers (i.e. people who possess a specific kind of knowledge and therefore skills) ought to rule. In the dialogue on The Statesman, for instance, the main character asserts that: “Physicians offer a particularly good example of this point of view. Whether they cure us against our will or with our will, by cutting us or burning us or causing us pain in any other way … we call them physicians just the same, so long as they exercise authority by art or science” (293b). By analogy, the same character then adds, “among forms of government, that one is preeminently right and is the only real government, in which the rulers are found to be truly possessed of science, not merely to seem to possess it … whether their subjects are willing or unwilling” (293c).

This is the core of what we shall call the classic argument for technocracy. What still needs to be explained, however, are the grounds on which Plato maintains that politics can be understood as a techne. Some commentators have suggested he simply “takes this for granted” (e.g. Accattino 1997: xv), but that would mean his whole argument for technocracy was just question-begging. In reality, Plato presents a powerful argument to support his key premise. In The Republic, when Socrates and Adeimantus begin constructing Plato’s “ideal city”, Socrates makes clear that the reason why human beings enter into cities in the first place is the satisfaction of their material “needs”. “The origin of the city”, he states,

lies in the fact that we are not, any of us, self-sufficient … Different individuals, then, form associations with one person to meet one need, and with another to meet a different need. With this variety of wants, they may collect a number of partners and allies into one place of habitation, and to this joint habitation we give the name city (269b–c).

This premise represented a radical break with key features of ancient Athenian political culture, which Plato was writing in (and against). Both Hannah Arendt (1958) and Moses Finley (1973) have emphasized that classical Greek political culture distinguished categorically between the domains of the oikos—the “home” construed as the domain for the satisfaction of “material needs” (i.e. production and reproduction)—and the polis, construed as the domain where free men would meet and act together as equals in pursuit of their “self-realization”. From this perspective, “economics” was understood as the set of norms (nomos) that pertained to the oikos. As Arendt further notes, these are necessarily “despotic” norms since the satisfaction of material needs is a techne which admits of right and wrong approaches. In contrast, the polis was assumed to be a domain in which “free men” would encounter each other on a basis of equality, and collectively strive for their individual “self-realization” (Arendt 1958: 28–37).

By claiming that human beings originally entered into cities to satisfy their material needs, Plato radically broke with this whole framework, implying that politics was about what his contemporaries would have called economics. This is precisely what Aristotle accuses him of at the beginning of his own treatise on Politics (1252a: 1–7). The conflation between the domains of politics and economics allows Plato to maintain that politics is a techne and therefore that only people who possess a specific kind of knowledge should rule. As we pointed out earlier, the Greeks assumed that the satisfaction of material needs was a science, and hence required a specific kind of knowledge to be carried out correctly. In contrast, the distinctively political activity of encountering others as equals and acting together for the purpose of everyone’s self-realization does not suppose any specific knowledge that would be available to some more than others.

This is expressed, in the form of a myth, in Plato’s Protagoras, where the title character attempts to defend democracy against Socrates’s competence-based approach. He maintains that whereas other “skills” were originally distributed by the gods in different measures to different animals and human beings, the capacity of “being political” was distributed equally to all human beings (320d1–322a2). The deeper point is that if politics is construed as a domain of freedom, and as oriented towards the “self-realization” of its participants (as opposed to the satisfaction of their material “needs”), then there cannot strictly be a science of politics. Human beings can only be free if they are allowed to pursue their self-realization in the way they think best. It is in this sense, therefore, that we contend that Plato’s argument for construing politics as a techne depends on a prior conflation of the domains of politics and economics. Doing so excises the notion of freedom fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: the technocratic challenge to democracy
• PART I: Concepts and theory
• PART II: Institutions, actors and policies
• PART III: Comparative perspectives
• Conclusion—Technocracy and democracy: friends or foes?
• Appendix
• References
• Index