Why are contemporary central banks – institutions designed to be narrow, technical, and apolitical – suddenly publishing extensively on non-monetary topics? This research essay explores how knowledge production has become central banks’ primary tool for managing a fundamental tension: expanding the scope of their interventions while maintaining technocratic legitimacy. By analysing their knowledge production across two key domains – climate change and digital currencies – we identify two axes of ‘scientisation’: boundary-pushing/keeping; and proactive/reactive. This suggests scientisation can be seen as a strategic response to mandate uncertainty, transforming expert knowledge into both a vehicle for negotiating central banks’ political mandate and a shield against democratic accountability. The implications of our findings extend beyond central banks, speaking to fundamental questions over technocratic power in an era of perpetual crisis.

This article investigates the structural hybridization of technocracy and democracy in European governance. Moving beyond normative and binary accounts that frame the two as mutually exclusive, we conceptualize their relationship as a systemic, relational, internal, and processual dynamic. Building on this framework, we develop a typology of four ideal-type governance configurations – techno-dominant, demo-dominant, high-intensity hybrid, and low-intensity hybrid – which captures the co-evolution and institutional entanglement of democratic and technocratic logics. Empirically, we construct original composite indices of technocracy and democracy using V-Dem data, and apply them to 893 country-year observations across the EU27 and the United Kingdom (1989–2024). The findings reveal significant regional variation and temporally differentiated trajectories of hybrid governance, shaped in part by major crises. Our typology offers a replicable tool for classifying governance regimes and invites further inquiry into how hybrid forms condition democratic legitimacy, institutional resilience, and the evolving architecture of political authority in the twenty-first century.

Many voters support the inclusion of technocrats in government. Yet we know very little about why technocrats are considered more appealing than traditional party representatives. In particular, it is unclear which advantages and disadvantages voters attach to the defining traits of technocratic ministers: party independence and expertise. We engage with this question drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment in Austria. We examine how manipulating ministers' party affiliation and expertise affects voters' perceptions of their issue competence and bargaining competence. Findings indicate that voters ascribe lower levels of issue competence to partisan ministers than to non-partisan ministers, notwithstanding their actual expertise, and that ministers' partisanship shrinks the positive effect of expertise on perceived issue competence. However, this ‘partisanship penalty’ disappears for supporters of the minister's party. Moreover, voters perceive partisanship as an advantageous trait with regard to a minister's bargaining competence. While voters like technocrats for their expertise and independence from party politics, our findings reveal nuanced perceptions, with voters still recognizing distinct advantages in being represented by party politicians.

A certain type of citizen holds technocratic views. They favour pragmatic problem solving through scientific and technical expertise, and reject party politics for being harmful to the common good. Yet, empirical evidence on the ideological profile of these citizens is fragmented and inconclusive. Using an original survey in Western Europe, Australia and the United States, we test predictions about the left−right alignment of citizens with technocratic attitudes on the economic and cultural dimensions of politics. We argue that technocracy is not antithetical to ideology and that citizens holding technocratic attitudes are not immune to ideological positions. Findings show that technocratic citizens are more economically left-wing than mainstream voters, contrary to common associations of technocracy with neoliberal economic principles. However, they are more centrist than populists. This highlights that, in addition to a representational challenge, technocracy mounts an ideological challenge to party-based representative democracy. In times of cumulative crises, which put democracies under stress with demands for competence and effectiveness, these findings offer insights about the appeal of alternative forms of representation.

Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat‐led governments to shift blame and re‐establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de‐legitimise their rule.

Systemic congruence between the whole legislature and the whole electorate (‘many‐to‐many’, or sociotropic congruence) should be the benchmark to evaluate a democratic system. Yet, most studies link shifts in democratic preferences to individual‐level representation (‘many‐to‐one’, or egocentric incongruence), since individual‐level representation failures should be more salient and visible for individual citizens. We argue that the sociotropic incongruence hypothesis has not been appropriately tested to date, because the measure does not vary at individual level in observational data. Using an experiment conducted in France, we manipulate various sociotropic (in)congruence scenarios at the individual level. In addition to the incongruence hypotheses, our original experiment tests whether offering expertise‐based justifications to incongruence attenuates the backlash against representatives. We find that, even when giving sociotropic incongruence a fair test, egocentric incongruence still consistently shapes democratic preferences, while the effect of sociotropic incongruence remains negligible. Furthermore, we find that narratives rooted in expertise claims do not attenuate the effect of representation failure on backlash against representative democracy: they exacerbate it.

Governments led by technocrats remain a nebulous category in political science literature, with little clarity about how they differ from party governments, how many have existed and how we can differentiate between them. This article aims to provide that conceptual and empirical clarity. Having proposed an ideal type definition of ‘technocratic government’, it sets out three conditions for an operational definition of a ‘technocrat’ and, on that basis, lists the 24 technocrat‐led governments that have existed in 27 European Union (EU) democracies from the end of the Second World War until June 2013. It then classifies these according to their partisan/technocrat composition and remit. This allows for the presentation of a typology of four different types of technocrat‐led governments and the definition of ‘full technocratic governments’ as those which contain a majority of technocrats and – unlike caretaker governments – have the capacity to change the status quo. The article concludes that full technocratic governments remain extremely rare in EU democracies since there have been only six cases – of which three have occurred in the last decade.

During the pandemic, science became one of the most salient issues in European polities. At the same time, relevant sectors of European societies were sceptical about science-driven policy to contain the pandemic (e.g., lockdowns or vaccine mandates). The literature so far has analysed the relevance of trust in experts and trust in science in determining compliance to pandemic-related policies. However, we still do not know what are the drivers that lead to (dis)trust science. In this paper, we contribute to fill this gap, by analysing the association between technocratic and populist attitudes and trust in science. Using a novel survey, fielded in Italy, among a sample of 5.000 respondents, we show that populism and technocracy are strongly related with (dis)trust in science in opposite directions.

Do citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand expert involvement in political decision‐making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non‐transparent nature of expert‐based governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians.

While the rise of populism in Western Europe over the past three decades has received a great deal of attention in the academic and popular literature, less attention has been paid to the rise of its opposite— anti-populism. This short article examines the discursive and stylistic dimensions of the construction and maintenance of the populism/anti-populism divide in Western Europe, paying particular attention to how anti-populists seek to discredit populist leaders, parties and followers. It argues that this divide is increasingly antagonistic, with both sides of the divide putting forward extremely different conceptions of how democracy should operate in the Western European political landscape: one radical and popular, the other liberal. It closes by suggesting that what is subsumed and feared under the label of the “populist threat” to democracy in Western Europe today is less about populism than nationalism and nativism.

Under what conditions citizens accept public institutions as legitimate authorities is a key question in political science. Recent accounts suggest that populist citizens reject international organisations (IOs) as distant, elitist, and undemocratic. Conversely, technocratic citizens should favour IOs as they represent the pinnacle of depoliticised, expertise-driven decision-making. In this article, we provide the first joint analysis of technocratic and populist attitudes as drivers of attitudes towards IOs. We analyse a unique survey conducted in five European countries that covers four IOs and ask how individual populist and technocratic attitudes influence attitudes towards IOs. We find only conditional evidence for a structural association between technocratic and populist and IO attitudes, and credible evidence that country-specific experiences with populism in power moderate these associations. Our contribution has important implications for our understanding of citizen attitudes towards various forms of political representation and the legitimacy of IOs.

While most Conditional Cash Transfer programs in Latin America expanded from rural to national coverage, Peru’s Juntos program maintained a strict rural focus for 15 years, systematically excluding poor urban households. This article examines the Peruvian paradox: why, despite regional trends and internal efforts to broaden coverage, Juntos remained territorially constrained. Using process tracing and semi-structured interviews with policymakers, senior bureaucrats, former congress members, and policy experts, the study identifies two institutional legacies rooted in the neoliberal reforms of the Fujimori era. First, the institutional consolidation of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) as a powerful veto player with control over public spending; and second, the diffusion of an ideational framework centered on fiscal austerity, efficiency, and aversion to clientelism. These legacies gave rise to two policy locks, a persistent rural bias and a regime of horizontal and fiscal control, that have limited the program’s adaptability to shifting poverty dynamics and urban demands.

How did the COVID-19 outbreak affect citizens’ democratic preferences? Were the changes persistent or temporary? We track a representative sample of Spanish citizens before, during, and after the pandemic, with eight survey waves from January 2020 to January 2024. We compare democratic attitudes before and after the pandemic with individual fixed effects models. We identify a sharp increase in preferences for technical rather than ideological policy-making at the very onset of the pandemic, as well as significant changes in voters’ preferences for competent rather than honest politicians. These changes are sudden and persistent over 4 years. Using a set of repeated survey experiments, we also document a widespread willingness to sacrifice rights and freedoms to deal with the pandemic as compared to other global threats, such as international terrorism and climate change. But this effect quickly faded over time. Overall, we identify significant changes in democratic attitudes during the pandemic and a durable shift in technocratic preferences that outlived the pandemic, setting the conditions for the long-term legacies of COVID-19 on democracy.

This article provides an overview of the main interpretations in contemporary historiography of the role of Italian political actors in the management of public debt during the First Republic, also in the context of European integration. In order to fill the gaps in historical research on this crucial issue, the conclusion proposes some questions and insights for future research.

Electoral competition is typically organized around an evolving set of policy issues. Recent Italian politics suggests a revival of two classic dimensions concerning the mode of interaction that defines the very goals of a polity: elitism (whether goals should be defined from the top down or from the bottom up) and pluralism (whether a polity should only accept widely shared common goals or whether multiple, alternative goals may legitimately compete). While these concerns possibly became less relevant in the heydays of the party government model, recent literatures on populism, technocracy, and process preferences reflect renewed interest. We introduce a two-dimensional elitism–pluralism scheme that explicates the spatial arrangement of top-down and bottom-up visions of party government vis-à-vis models of populism and technocracy. To demonstrate the relevance of the two dimensions for party preference, we turn to the case of the 2022 Italian election, which followed a sequence of a populist, a mixed populist-mainstream and a technocratic government. Voter positions from specialized batteries of the Italian National Election Study are contrasted with party positions from an original expert survey. Findings indicate that preferences on elitism and pluralism complement standard dimensions of issue voting. An explorative analysis of comparative data suggests that many countries across Europe have the potential for similar developments. Electoral competition increasingly reflects concerns about its own principles.