Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics

by Christopher J. Bickerton, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti

Contemporary democracies face a crisis of political representation. In understanding this crisis, scholars and commentators often frame it as the 'end' or the 'collapse' of democracy. This book takes a very different path. It argues that we are witnessing a transformation in the nature and practice of political competition within existing democratic regimes. This transformation consists in the rise of a new political field, techno-populism. Within this field, appeals to the people and appeals to expertise are the new structuring logic of democratic politics. Populist appeals to a unitary 'people' combine in multiple ways with technocratic claims about efficient policy-making and policy implementation. These multiple combinations form the basis for the varieties of techno-populism outlined in detail in this book. We focus in particular on British, French, and Italian cases. The concept of technopopulism helps us to make sense of new and idiosyncratic political movements such as En Marche! and the Five Star Movement. Technopopulism is also the conceptual key to understanding the significance of Blairism for British politics and its legacy in the profound transformations underway in the contemporary Conservative Party. The transition from an ideological struggle between left and right to this technopopulist political field where populist and technocratic appeals are fused together into novel forms of political organization is having a significant impact on the quality of democratic political competition. This book analyses the origins and consequences of the rise of technopopulism, as well as considering the remedies available to us to tackle its negative effects.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

352 pages, ebook

Published April 20, 2021

About the author

Christopher Bickerton is a Professor in Modern European Politics at POLIS and an Official Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He obtained his BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) from Somerville College, Oxford and his Masters from the Graduate Institute in Geneva. He obtained his PhD from the University of Oxford (St John’s College) in 2008 and since then has held teaching positions at Oxford, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Sciences Po in Paris.

He has published numerous books and articles that span a number of different fields within social and political science. These include three research monographs, European Union Foreign Policy: From Effectiveness to Functionality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; paperback in 2015), European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford University Press, 2021, co-authored with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti). His 2012 book on state transformation was awarded the Best Book prize by the University Association of Contemporary European Studies. His articles have been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Political Studies, International Politics and the Revue Française de Science Politique. In 2011, he co-edited a special issue in JCMS on the EU’s security and defence policy (with Bastien Irondelle and Anand Menon).

In 2016, he published the best-selling The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide with Penguin, which was submitted for the Baillie-Gifford prize, the UK’s leading non-fiction literary prize. He is currently under contract with Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA for a history of Europe since 1989. Beyond academic publishing, he has written articles for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, New York Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and The Big Issue. He is regularly interviewed for national and international radio and has been a panellist on the Talking Politics podcast.

Reviews

[Alexei · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are books that redeem their tedious academic style with valuable insights. This one doesn’t. It proposes a seemingly clever model of the current crisis of liberal democracy with practically no applications and proceeds to squeeze three meager examples, the UK’s New Labour, Italy’s M5S, and Spain’s Podemos, into the recalcitrant scheme. The trouble is, it does not really define what it means by populism, accepting most current definitions including some that are incompatible. Whatever populism is, it usually defines itself against some real or imaginary adversary, “the elites” on the right, the “class of billionaires” on the left - go ahead, try to find any of those with the New Labour! The authors ignore such major examples as the US of Donald Trump, Brasil of Bolsonaro, India of Modi and what not. The entire structure is meaningless without these. If you value your time, avoid this book.