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During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans' attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens' satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens' attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific, political and bureaucratic elites use epistemic practices like "big data analysis" and "web scraping" to create representations of the citizenry and to legitimize policymaking. I develop the concept of "demos scraping" for these practices of gaining information about citizens (the "demos") through automated analysis of digital trace data which are re-purposed for political means. This article critically engages with the discourse advocating demos scraping and provides a conceptual analysis of its democratic implications. It engages with the promise of demos scraping advocates to reduce the gap between political elites and citizens and highlights how demos scraping is presented as a superior form of accessing the "will of the people" and to increase democratic legitimacy. This leads me to critically discuss the implications of demos scraping for political representation and participation. In its current form, demos scraping is technocratic and de-politicizing; and the larger political and economic context in which it takes place makes it unlikely that it will reduce the gap between elites and citizens. From the analytic perspective of a post-democratic turn, demos scraping is an attempt of late modern and digitalized societies to address the democratic paradox of increasing citizen expectations coupled with a deep legitimation crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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