Varieties of Technopopulism

This paper is a chapter from a forthcoming book entitled Techno-populism: the new structuring logic of democratic politics.

The book argues that in contemporary Europe we are seeing a shift from an ideological political field based around the conflict between left and right, towards a technopopulist political field where appeals to the people (populism) and appeals to expertise (technocracy) constitute the two poles with which political actors define themselves. Whilst this is a general trend, national contexts matter greatly and in this chapter we explore three paradigmatic cases of technopopulism: Britain’s New Labour, Italy’s Five Star Movement and Emanuel Macron and his En Marche! movement in France. Each of these cases represents a different way of fusing populism and technocracy together into one single political offer. The chapter goes through each of these cases and also discusses hybrid cases that combine the traditional ideological political field with the emerging technopopulist field. This chapter provides us with the conceptual tools required to understand novel forms of political organization that are emerging across Europe and which are challenging in fundamental ways our understandings of modern representative democracy.

Christopher Bickerton is a Reader in Modern European Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Cambridge University. He is also an Official Fellow in Politics at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He received his doctorate in International Relations from St Johns College, Oxford, and has taught at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Sciences Po, Paris, in France. His research is on both European integration and the comparative politics of Europe. He published with Oxford University Press in 2012 European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States, which was awarded the best book prize of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES). In 2016, he published with Penguin a best-selling book, The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide. He is currently working on a co-authored book with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (CUNY) scheduled to be published with Oxford University Press in 2020, entitled Techno-Populism: The New Structuring Logic of Democratic Politics. Alongside his academic writing, he regularly contributes to the international media. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Monde Diplomatique. He is a regular panelist on the popular podcast, Talking Politics.

Jonathan White is the Deputy Head of the LSE European Institute and Professor in Politics.