The People and the Experts in European Party Politics

Every policy decision involves questions of taste (desired ends) and questions of technique (appropriate means).  Attention to the first privileges citizens while attention to the second privileges technocrats - but given the impossibility of neatly separating means from ends, there is always an unavoidable tension between the two sources of authority, complicated by the facts that the citizens are unlikely to see themselves as incompetent and the professional judgement of technocrats is likely to coloured (and seen to be coloured) by their own tastes.  This tension is widely recognized in dealings between politicians (claiming to represent the people) and bureaucrats (claiming to have superior expertise), but as political parties have become increasingly reliant on experts (marketing consultants, pollsters, and the like), and as the policies of "mainstream" parties have become more similar and their leaders more identified as forming a self-referential political class that includes technocrats as well as politicians, it has become a focus of interparty (populists v. mainstream) and intraparty (internal democracy v. deference to leadership) conflict as well. This paper addresses the tension between popular control (one aspect of the phenomenon of populism) and the need for expertise (in extreme form, technocracy) through the lens of party politics in Europe.