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Abstract
Populism and technocracy represent a challenge to pluralist party democracies. The first promotes the rule by ‘the people’, while the second demands the rule by independent experts. The literature on populism and technocracy as challenges to party democracy is burgeoning. Less is known about citizens’ attitudes towards the ideas that underpin both populism and technocracy. In this article these opinions are explored in a survey conducted in Spain using a comprehensive battery of items tapping into technocracy and populism. It is found that populist attitudes correlate with two dimensions of technocracy: anti-politics and pro-expertise sentiments. A latent-class analysis shows that the largest sample group simultaneously endorses rule by the people and the enrolment of experts in political decision making. In the article this group is named technopopulists. The article challenges extant views of populism and technocracy as separate alternatives and spurs works on voter demand for the involvement of experts in politics.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2027116 .
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank participants at the MPSA 2021 panel entitled ‘“Experts Not Politicians”: How Did COVID19 and the Public Health Crisis Change Attitudes towards Expertise in Politics?’, namely Despina Alexiadou, Eri Bertsou, Jordi Muñoz and Jacob Sohlberg. We also would like to thank the editors and three anonymous referees for their suggestions. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The literature on cognitive mobilization (see Dalton Citation1984, Citation2000, Citation2007,), by describing how sophisticated apartisan voters rely less on partisan identification and party cues, and more on candidates’ qualities and competence prefigured some of these commonalities.
2 By way of two illustrative examples, the drafting of the first economic programme of Podemos was commissioned by the party leadership to two relatively well-known academic economists (La Vanguardia Citation2014), and Ciudadanos frequently proposed policies that weakened the intervention of parties and the executive in favour of the role of experts (see, for example, Sáinz Citation2016).
3 These survey panels are large databases of opted-in participants who take surveys regularly on a wide variety of topics.
4 The Online appendix includes the original question wording in Spanish, as well as summary statistics in both survey waves (see ).
5 A Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient of 0.71 suggests that the internal consistency of the set of populism questions is relatively high.
6 A correlation matrix confirms these results as regards the sign and the strength of the relationships. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients for the expertise and anti-politics items hover between 0.2 and 0.3. For the elitism dimension, they lie below 0.1. Correlation matrices can be found in the online appendix ().
7 Summary statistics for the three principal components are added to the online appendix (Table A.3).
8 Coefficients for vote choice (2019) are not reported in Figure 4 due to space limits.
9 See Table A.4. for full regression results for both models.
10 In the Online appendix we show that the evidence remains qualitative unchanged when we apply a five-class or a seven-class model rather than the six-class model that we present in the main text. See Figures A.9-A.10 and Tables A.7 and A.8 in the online appendix.
11 Figure A.7 in the Appendix presents the within-group averages for each latent class.
12 The Online appendix analyses membership in the other key latent classes: ‘technocratic citizens’, ‘technopols’ and ‘party democracy citizens’. See Figures A.1–A.6 in the online appendix.
13 The outcome in the regression model is a continuous variable that ranges from 0 to 1. In addition to this model, we have estimated an alternative one with a dummy variable as outcome. Evidence is reported in Figure A.8 and Table A.6 in the online appendix.
14 Table A.5 in the online appendix presents the full regression output.
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Notes on contributors
Pablo Fernández-Vázquez
Pablo Fernandez-Vazquez is a Talent Attraction Associate Professor at Carlos III University in Madrid. He received his PhD in Political Science from New York University. He studies political representation, with a focus on party competition, technocracy and populism, and political corruption. His work has been published in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. [[email protected]]
Sebastián Lavezzolo
Sebastián Lavezzolo is Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Department at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He received his PhD in Political Science from New York University. His research interests lie in the field of comparative political economy, with a particular focus on the relationship between politics and finance. Other fields of research in which he is interested include political history, political representation and political behaviour. His articles have appeared in journals such as West European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review, Economic Systems, Comparative Migration Studies and Journal of Business Research. [[email protected]]
Luis Ramiro
Luis Ramiro is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at UNED (Spain). He is Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics of SciencesPo (Paris). His research centres on political attitudes, political organisations and political behaviour. His most recent publications have focussed on the vote for radical-left parties, party organisation and political attitudes. His work has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, Party Politics, European Political Science Review, and Political Studies. [[email protected]]