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That democratic authorities are systematically focused on short-term considerations is a charge often made. This 'democratic myopia' thesis typically becomes the basis for advocating the empowerment of technocratic institutions, for example in economic policy. Much less examined is what one may call the technocratic myopia thesis – the possibility that technocratic institutions have their own distinctive drivers of short-termism. This article presents the case, with reference to the legitimacy forms, epistemologies and organisational structures in which technocratic authority is grounded. The suggestion is that not only may technocrats fall short of the claims to long-sightedness made of them, but that this is directly bound up in some of the core features of the technocratic method. The article goes on to discuss the implications for how contemporary societies govern the future in key domains of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno-public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of publicness. Our findings challenge the dystopian speculative critiques of the smart city, while nevertheless indicating the dominance of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘service user’ modes of the public. We highlight the risk of bifurcation within smart city assemblages, such that the ‘civic’ and ‘political’ roles of the public become siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 'European Semester', a new framework for policy co-ordination across European Union (EU) member states, represents a major step in EU governance. Created in 2010 in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises and revamped in 2015, it was intended to provide a new socioeconomic governance architecture to co-ordinate national policies without transferring full sovereignty to the EU level. This introduction offers a brief overview and assessment of the European Semester, examining its implications along three critical axes, running respectively between the economic and the social, the supranational and the intergovernmental, and the technocratic and democratic poles of EU governance. We introduce and briefly summarize the seven other contributions that make up this collection. Our conclusions are that the European Semester challenges established theoretical understandings of EU governance, as it is a prime example of the complexity that supersedes simple polar oppositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to review the rationale, nature and operation of independent fiscal councils (IFCs) in order to gain insights into how futures are being configured at executive levels of government and to examine how futures could be incorporated in policy making. The emphasis IFCs have placed on non-partisanship, transparency and forecasting is viewed as reflecting a particular understanding of the problem of public debt and a limited understanding of the future and policy making. Located within the context of increasing technocratic tendencies, it is argued that IFCs can be seen as part of efforts to secure the de-politicisation of policy making. Attempts to secure the de-politicisation of policy making may at best, be considered laudable, but naïve, and at worst, represents an ideological sleight of hand in attempts to colonise the future. Moving forward, it is argued that strategic foresight can make a vital contribution to an open form of policy making that deepens and extends an understanding of what the future could be - the necessary ficta of policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long-standing debate about the proper application of democratic versus technocratic approaches to decision-making in public policy. This paper seeks to clarify the debate by applying Michael Walzer's notion of 'spheres of justice,' wherein both democracy and technocracy could be seen as distinctive approaches to justice that need to be protected from the domination of the other. The paper shows how the debate on democracy versus technocracy has evolved in both theoretical and applied settings in a manner that reflects the 'domination' of one approach by the other. It elaborates the argument through several concrete examples drawn from comparative politics, public policy, and public management. It then explores how the 'spheres' approach implies the need for an interpretive mechanism in order to mediate the competing notions of justice in particular policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the European Union's (EU) expanding role as internal security actor, all member states have been required to generate similar integreated national risk assessments by 2014. At first sight, this could be welcomed as a departure from the ad hoc or crisis-driven policy-making dynamics that have long been criticized by critical commentators of EU internal security policy. In particular, the evolution of risk assessments relates to wider efforts to forge an evidence-based approach to internal security and to advance broader concepts of risk prevention and resilience as guiding principles for its future role in internal security. However, there is also a need for critical reflection on this growing trend and its implications for the EU. Frameworks for risk assessment need to be contrasted with the varied or lacking risk management practices on the ground and deeper contestations of seemingly technical methods of risk assessment, going beyond the question of legal implementation that dominates the ‘post-Stockholm’ debate. This article elucidates the functional and political limits for the implementation of standardized risk assessments, but also shows how the adoption of common guidelines still serves as a political tool for the legitimation of further policy initiatives in EU internal security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to technical complexity, most public policies in technological society are dominated by expert-centrism and technocracy (an institutional form of expert-centrism), based on the belief that they should be the exclusive realm of technical experts. But globally, expert-led and technocratic policy-making culture is faced with challenges. We analyse the democratic implications of the Korean experience of the citizens' jury, a form of citizens' deliberative participation. We document and examine the citizens' jury on the National Pandemic Response System in 2008, which was the first case of the citizens' jury in Korea. We conclude that such characteristics of citizens' jury present positive implications in realising deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques author Karen Bakker's book "Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World's Urban Water Crisis." Bakker's role as a water governance scholar is addressed, along with an analysis of Bakker's reasoning. Terminology is examined, along with challenges involving ecological, ideological, and socioeconomic issues. Market environmentalism and democracy are assessed, as well as technocracy and economic exigencies.