‘Techno-populism’ as a new party family: the case of the Five Star Movement and Podemos

ABSTRACT

Democratic politics in Southern Europe have been shaken by the emergence of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy and Podemos in Spain. Initially dismissed as protest movements, both point to broader structural transformations taking place within the region’s political systems. Focusing on three dominant notions in the literature, ‘anti-system’, ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘populist’ party types, this article critically discusses each of these conceptual categories. It finds that none of them captures the originality of these movements, namely their combination of ‘populist’ and ‘technocratic’ conceptions of politics and modes of presentation. Revisiting the term ‘techno-populism,’ this article recasts it as a new party family. As well as shedding light on the distinctive nature of the M5S and Podemos, this article aims to contribute to defining a broader ‘ideal-type’ of techno-populism, which can serve as the basis for a new research agenda combining work on technocracy, populism and political parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Five Star Movement
• Podemos
• political parties
• populism
• anti-system

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article’s emphasis on the similarities between the M5S and Podemos is not meant to deny that there are also important differences between them, as some authors have rightly emphasised (Borriello and Mazzolini 2017). The point is rather that, given the many manifest differences, there are some striking and unexplored points of similarity, which in our opinion justify treating them as a part of a single political ‘family’ in the sense in which this notion is routinely used in the political science literature to categorise party types (Mair and Mudde 1998).

2. For a useful discussion of these aspects of the M5S, see Deseriis (2017) and Andretta and Albertini (2016).

3. Caruso provides a detailed account of the Movement’s support for small and medium-sized businesses and its embrace of what Caruso calls ‘digital capitalism’. (Caruso 2017).

4. Zulianello himself classes the M5S as an ‘anti-system’ party in the ‘substantive’ sense because of some of its members’ ostensible support for withdrawal from the European Union, or at least the Eurozone (Cf. Ibid: 8). However, even barring the fact that different M5S exponents have been far from consistent on this point, we disagree on the basis of the consideration that membership in the EU (as well as the Eurozone) has become such a mainstream issue of political contestation that advocating withdrawal cannot be taken to constitute opposition to one of the ‘crucial elements constituting the sources of legitimation upon which the political regime itself is built’ (Ibid: 9). By such a standard, the UK’s Conservative Party in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum (i.e. while the UK is still a member of the EU) would count as substantively ‘anti-system’ – which seems like a case of ‘concept stretching’ (Sartori 1970).

5. For an overview of the definitional issues, see – inter alia – (Canovan 1999; Taggart 2000; Mudde 2004; Laclau 2005; Muller 2016).

6. As we shall see, the notion of ‘techno-populism’ is not entirely new, but was previously used to refer to a challenge to political parties as such. In their seminal contribution on this notion, for instance, Arthur Lipow and Patrick Seyd describe it as a form of ‘anti-party sentiment’ (Lipow and Patrick 1995, 1). What we are proposing is to revisit this label to account for the fact that such a ‘sentiment’ has been incorporated into the explicit discourse of several formal political parties, and can therefore serve as the basis for the identification of a new party ‘family’ in Mair and Mudde’s sense. This will require expanding on Lipow and Seyd’s original definition of ‘techno-populism’, while also shifting the emphasis from the idea that new technologies can replace political parties to a broader conception of politics itself as a techne in the Greek (and more precisely Platonic) sense.

7. M5S activist, cited in Caruso (2017).

8. Ceccarini and Bordignon observe that ‘in [Grillo’s] widely popular shows, entertainment was mixed with campaigns of mobilisation and denunciation around issues of public interest and the “common good”’ (Ceccarini and Bourdignon 2016, 134).