Populism and Technocracy: Opposites or Complements?

Taking stock of the fact that ‘populism’ and ‘technocracy’ increasingly appear as two of the organizing poles of contemporary politics in western democracies, this paper seeks to examine the relationship between them. The argument we advance is that, although these two terms – and the political realities they refer to – are usually presented as irreducibly opposed to one another, there is also an important element of complementarity between them. This complementarity consists in the fact that both populism and technocracy are predicated on an implicit critique of a specific political form, which we refer to here as ‘party democracy’, defining it as a political regime based on two key features: the mediation of political conflicts through the institution of political parties; and a procedural conception of political legitimacy according to which political outcomes are legitimate just to the extent that they are the product of a set of democratic procedures revolving around the principles of parliamentary deliberation and majority rule. In order to advance this argument, we rely on a close analysis of works by Ernesto Laclau and Pierre Rosanvallon as exemplary manifestations of the contemporary cases for populism and technocracy respectively.