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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how a structure of Weberian rational domination has been built and consolidated in Spain since 1959, the year when the so‐called Economic Stabilization Plan was approved. This sort of economic constitution represents one of the most important foundations of a technocratic regime that survived the death of a dictator (General Francisco Franco), not only transcending the traditional differentiations between autocratic and democratic regimes but also offering a different perspective to the debate about the degree of continuity and rupture attained by the Spanish political transition in the 1970s. We analyze the institutions, leadership, most influential networks, political discourse, and historical myths through a theory of power and elites to examine the Spanish case. With this remarkable example of structural transformation and institutional resilience over decades, we also propose a more complex and multidimensional approach that could be fruitful to understanding some of the problems of political representation that current democracies are undergoing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project of bolstering the administrative state's perceived legitimacy is central to administrative law. To enhance agencies' legitimacy with the public, generations of judges and scholars have variously called for changes designed to insulate technocrats from political influence, involve interested members of the public, and subject agencies to greater political control. Despite the pitch of debate in elite legal circles, however, little is known about the views of ordinary citizens--the very people whose beliefs constitute popular legitimacy. This Article provides evidence of Americans' actual views concerning what features contribute to agencies' perceived legitimacy. It presents the results of a set of experiments in which each participant views a policy vignette with varied information concerning the structures and procedures involved in generating the policy. Participants are then asked to assess, by their own lights, the policy's legitimacy. The results support the century-old idea that empowering politically insulated, expert decision-makers legitimizes agencies. With the insulation of civil servants from appointees and the independent-agency form under strain, this finding implies that, for proponents of a robust administrative state, an independent and technocratic civil service is worth defending. There also is some evidence that public participation in agency decision-making bolsters agencies' perceived legitimacy. By contrast, the theory--influential on the Supreme Court--that greater presidential involvement enhances legitimacy receives no support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the concept of technocracy and its relationship with populism and liberal democracy. Technocracy is described as a governance system led by experts who make decisions based on technical knowledge. It is seen as a depoliticized approach that prioritizes reason and expertise over democratic processes. Populism, on the other hand, emphasizes the will of the people and often disregards minority rights and checks and balances. The article argues that both technocracy and populism are incompatible with liberal democracy and highlights the rise of neoliberal technocracy as a driver of populism. It concludes by emphasizing the need for a repoliticization of socioeconomic issues and a renewal of representative politics within the democratic framework. [Extracted from the article]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article in NPE, Rajesh Venugopal (2022. Can the anti-politics machine be dismantled? New political economy, 1–15) concluded that the anti-politics machine was still in operation. He argued that development planners held a cognitive divide between the realm of political dynamics – an unknowable terra incognita – and the realm of operational technical knowledge. This article revisits and expands that argument. It takes a particular kind of adaptive project as an analytical entry point, arguing that their focus on political practice reimagines the ontology of politics as a kind of expert mētis which is situated, relational and emergent. Such projects hold out hope that the anti-politics machine can be dismantled by displacing the cognitive frames of the development planner from the centre stage and emphasising political practice during implementation. However, shifting attention to implementation reveals other elements of the anti-politics machine’s operation. Drawing on interviews with policy advocates, the article shows that the anti-politics machine does not simply work through the cognition of the planner: it also acts through bureaucratic resistance to political practice during project implementation, produced through operational, accountability and financing processes that shackle practice, particularly in spaces with heterogeneous interests and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of the university in the demise of democracy. In a country which was once seen as the world's leading democracy, albeit one in which the democracy was harnessed to the requisite constraints of a republic, almost half of the population believe that the last two elections were stolen, and Presidents Trump and Biden were not legitimate. Democracies in Western Europe are equally factious. What prevails now in the West is a general inability for voters to be able to put aside personal differences and accept defeat at the ballot box. The willingness to accept defeat and be able to trust your political opponents not to destroy the institutions of the nation is the prerequisite for the preservation of a democratic system. The dominant factions which face each other with unmitigated suspicion can broadly be classified as the tertiary educated urban professional classes who are allied with globalist and corporate "leaders," and the more regionally based and non-professional classes. More specifically, I focus on the class interests of the pedagogical classes, particularly those employed in the tertiary sector and the media (loosely construed as the class which makes a living from crafting, monitoring and disseminating ideas); the technocratic character of that class; the metaphysical ideas that have propelled the empowerment of that class and its importance as educators; the ideological consensuses that have triumphed in the academy in the twentieth century; and how the ideology of emancipation that has been forged in universities, and the managerial revolution that has enabled the corporatization of the university, have contributed to the demise of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Are public sector workers more supportive of technocracy than people not employed in the public sector? Public sector workers play an important role in the functioning and safeguarding of democracy. However, because of their training as neutral and competent policy workers and implementers, it is often claimed that they hold relatively strong technocratic attitudes. In this study, we compare the support for technocracy of 35,395 public sector and non‐public sector workers across 25 European countries. The results show that on average, public sector workers are not more supportive of technocracy than non‐public sector workers, and that the effect of public sector employment on support for technocracy differs across countries. Furthermore, we find that trust in representative institutions and satisfaction with government can reduce support for technocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ideas, reception and social role of Germany's most prominent cultural critic of lockdown politics, Gunnar Kaiser. In contrast to the majority of European intellectuals, Kaiser took an early public stand against the naive adoption of science as a social authority and the unprecedented overturning of core democratic principles. He argued that without vigorous, open debate, the worldwide state of emergency threatened to usher in a fundamentally new (bio)political era, in which liberal democracy would be replaced by an increasingly totalitarian technocracy. Yet despite his voluminous philosophical output, which included a highly creative and increasingly professionalised YouTube channel as well as two best-selling books, Kaiser found himself largely excluded from mainstream German discourse. Crew analyses the full range of Kaiser's interventions while also situating him within the broader landscape of European dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a process‐tracing approach to understand changes in Singapore's health sector from the start of self‐rule in 1959 to the end of the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2022. Singapore is a developmental state recognized for its effective management of healthcare costs and its lack of political freedom. In both respects, the 'Singapore model' is of interest to other cities and nations. The standard narrative is one of technocratic proficiency in a context in which civic freedoms are heavily constrained, but this article identifies the surprisingly important role of social voices at key moments. It finds episodes in which effective changes to social policies are not the product of a state embedded in an organized society, but rather are influenced by the independent organizational capacity of certain social groups providing inputs to state elites on social grievances and policy needs. Effective policy changes require a responsive state elite that — even if it is technocratically dominated, as is the case in Singapore — can listen to social claims and provide answers that are not repressive. The article conceptualizes these dynamics as 'grievance politics' and shows their role in explaining health reforms. It contributes to understanding global health systems and policy making in developmental states by a fruitful cross‐fertilization with social movement studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have tried to identify citizens' views about which actors should govern and how. These studies have mostly looked at support for citizens or independent experts being given a greater role. Recently, Hibbing, Theiss-Morse, Hibbing and Fortunato have proposed a new battery of 21 survey items capturing the dimensions along which citizens' preferences for who should govern are organized. Testing their survey instrument among US respondents, they identified seven dimensions. In this study, we replicate their approach across nine European democracies, namely, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Ireland and the Netherlands. The replication allows, first, to compare citizens' preferences for political actors between the US and Europe, and within Europe. Second, it provides suggestions for how Hibbing and colleagues' battery might be adapted and re-used in other countries, enabling further cross-national comparative research on citizens' preferences for who should govern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernism is the belief in a world that can be understood in objective terms and controlled as such. Even though it is commonly understood to be a naïve worldview, public administration theorists believe it to still aptly describe the modus operandi of modern states—albeit in more subtle forms. This raises the question whether that makes civil servants naïve modernists, or whether theories of the modernist state are oversimplifying government practice. This study explores this question by means of interviews with civil servants involved in decision making processes on infrastructure investments. It finds that modernist norms do not describe an actual practice, but reflect the language used to legitimize a practice in which policy makers are driven by a desire to act rather than objective knowledge about the world. Consequently, the study argues that the question we should be asking ourselves is not why states still operate according to modernist principles, but why civil servants legitimize their practice with a set of norms that does not seem to describe it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite participatory institutions' increasing ubiquity, we know little about their effects on governance and well-being. What we do know comes largely from Brazil, where positive outcomes have been attributed to civil society's role in implementation. Often, however, participatory institutions are imposed by national governments, with little civil society engagement. In these cases, scholars have argued, participatory institutions are unlikely to improve governance and well-being, as civil society is not present to unlock the institutions' potential. We test this proposition in Peru, the first country featuring government mandated participatory institutions for all subnational governments. We find, surprisingly, that Peru's participatory budgeting process increased pro-poor spending and improved citizen's quality of life. We attribute these outcomes to reduced information asymmetries, made possible by the central role played by an influential and autonomous government agency. We employ a unique panel dataset, as well as an original survey and extensive interviews with government and civil society actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we conceptualise politicised integration at the global level? Functionalism and neo-functionalism are de-politicised, technocratic theories of integration dispensing with ideology and contestation, while post-functionalist approaches address politicisation but not supra-national integration. Drawing on comparative macro-historical theories, this article suggests a conceptualisation of politicised integration that extends exit–voice and political structuring models used at national and European levels to global integration. The replacement of territorial divisions with cleavages cutting across world regions – core–periphery and North–South divisions, civilisations and ‘multiple modernities’ – creates the conditions for cross-territorial dimensions of contestation, along which cross-regional membership groups link, coordinate and form bonds of solidarity. The de-territorialisation of global cleavages and the regional convergence it brings about, provide the social bases for mass politics rather than elitist policy integration. The conceptualisation of integration is political rather than technocratic, and one in which collective decision making is a matter of pluralist contestation rather than problem-solving expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to explore Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003) in order to examine how the corporeal schema of a feeling human is radically reconfigured in the contemporary capitalist culture that thrives on augmenting the lived body's somatic and cognitive experientiality. By accommodating a narrative frame where the location of the body as an organically sealed discrete biological category is problematized, the novel partakes in a landscape of endless entanglements. How such an ontological convergence unsettles the epistemic realms of reasoning is what this reading attempts to investigate. DeLillo's novel dramatizes a reconceptualization of human subjectivity by unpacking a conflation of biogenetic matter and algorithmic flow of data within a postmodern metropolis. To situate this problematic, the reading affirms "intra-active" transactions between the biomedically theorized body and extra-human ontologies. In illustrating how the notional frames of epistemological certitude seem increasingly untenable in the cultures of neoliberal technocracy, the novel points toward a posthuman condition and wagers what appears to be a transhumanist ethos at the end. The essay interrogates this trajectory by looking at templates of corporeal entanglement in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the tyranny of science and the masses' reaction to it, considering the situation in which the overturned mask norm, which is different from the medically desirable mask norm, has been practiced in Japanese society. The model of the human being that science assumes is frequently inclined to be limited to a very narrow model of the modern citizen or a rational, ideal human being with sufficient information to make decisions. Such a metaphysical understanding of human beings and society does not assume that the masses will not accept it. As a result, science has no choice but to use mathematically derived fear to control the masses. Science will always have a tyrannical and magical character in the sense that fear is necessary for the realization of the scientific expectations of experts. To incite fear, technology should be not only scientific but also symbolic (ritualistic) in the society in which it is used. However, once the fear becomes a reality, the masses, instead of being increasingly frightened by it, begin to doubt the scientific explanations of the experts. As a result, the tyranny of science starts to collapse. It is in the masses, who are perceived as the furthest removed from science, that the opportunity exists for science to be relativized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The response to the global COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted a surge in short‐term universal cash transfer programmes around the world. Notably, East Asian high‐income economies have been at the forefront of these initiatives. While the innovative nature of these universal cash injections has been emphasized, there is limited documentation regarding their characteristics, prospects, and underlying motivations. This article sheds light on the domestic political and institutional processes that led to the implementation and design of universal cash transfers in Hong Kong (China), Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (China). Overall, the analysis reveals that, within the framework of universality, a nuanced, diverse and dynamic set of operational choices emerge. A range of factors shaped the adoption and evolution of these programmes, including, for example, political pressures stemming from political party competition and efforts to maintain political legitimacy. In general, design parameters are not only defined in technocratic terms, but are negotiated politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kind of challenge is right-wing populism for the European Union (EU)? The EU has been frequently criticized by populists and non-populists alike for being a remote technocracy that suffers from serious democratic defects. Democratization relies on popular (and system insider) feedback, to spell out where the shortcomings are, and how these can be rectified. Does populism play this role—is it capable of playing this role—in the EU today? I discuss that under three headings: (1) Is populism a democratizing challenge for the EU? (2) Is populism a democratic challenge for the EU? (3) Is populism an existential threat to the EU? The article finds that populists dismiss the prospects for EU democracy and espouse conceptions of people, community, and values that are out of synch with the EU. Today's populists appear less concerned with abolishing the EU and more bent on altering it to serve their ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses three features that characterise the authoritarian restoration following what is known as the Arab springs of 2011: a) the recourse to technocratic governments, b) the proliferation of discourses on the depoliticisation of governance and c) the postponement of the renegotiation of the old social contracts. Added to this is the importance of the international nexus, given that strategic allied states at a global level and international financial institutions embrace a formula that ensures stability and facilitates the implementation of neoliberal reforms. However, this authoritarian technopopulism fails to address the economic demands of the population, nor does it provide avenues of political inclusion or a framework for drawing up a new social contract; at best, it serves momentarily as a structure to contain the protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European 'messianic' project was not particularly concerned with democracy or human rights, but rather sought 'legitimacy' in the nobility of its cause. However, when failure struck during the Euro-crisis, many sources of legitimacy suddenly collapsed. Similarly, failure struck the rule of law principle, demonstrating its precariousness and weak source of legitimation. The strong waves of de-europeanisation and the rise of illiberal democracies not only bolster the existing preoccupations of problematic democratic procedures, but further bring into question the continuity of the EU as a supranational entity. Interestingly, the European Union's answer to these issues furnishes a solution that, on the one hand, focuses on the enhancement of democracy, while focusing the safeguarding of rule of law on the other. Such an enhancement of democracy could be the result of the Conference on the Future of Europe, whereas, the rule of law crisis is meant to be addressed through financial and techno-managerial mechanisms. However, if the first mechanism aims to palliate or even mitigate the democratic deficit, the second one risks further alienating Union citizens by seeing in it another instance of European Union 'technocracy'. The solution to be foreseen is to reconnect democracy with rule of law as they have always been the foreign implants of European integration. Filling in these empty gaps of political messianism through an outright pairing of democracy and rule of law will rejuvenate the social legitimacy of European exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the analysis of discursive shifts in the constructions of teachers' roles during the twentieth century in the Russian Federation, this paper argues that pedagogy becomes redefined based on the political elites' vision for the society's future. During the Soviet era, teachers were expected to play a key role in social transformation. In order to transform the world, they were expected to deploy humanistic pedagogy to help all students realise their potential. During the post-Soviet era, this vision was abandoned. As teachers were expected to fulfil the function of social control, they were called to adopt technocratic pedagogy that comprised principles of psychologisation, individualisation, pathologisation, and depoliticisation. Psychologisation of teachers' roles and pathologisation of diversity became deployed to "adapt students to the world" by addressing problems within students rather than in the society. The significance of this paper lies in demonstrating connections between shifting discourses of teachers' roles, pedagogy, and pursuit of social transformation or conservative social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Europeans are favourable towards the idea of being governed by 'independent experts', and despite the burgeoning literature on technocratic ministers, we still miss important information about the profiles of technocrats in government. This article provides new insights into the characteristics of non-partisan, non-elected ministers and the roles they perform once in government based on a Technocratic Ministers' Dataset covering all governments in 31 European countries from 2000 to 2020. First, we show that average share of technocratic (as opposed to partisan) ministers in European cabinets rose from 9.5% to 14.2% over the last two decades. This increase is characteristic of all macro-regions, except Scandinavian countries. Second, technocratic ministers are assigned to a diversity of portfolios and not just finance and economy, which, respectively, account for only 15% of technocratic ministers. Finally, technocratic ministers do not hold office for shorter periods of time than partisan ones, except when they are part of caretaker cabinets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rationalities advanced by 18 higher education institutions, located across eight countries, for developing and delivering employability provision. The article uses Sultana's Habermasian-derived framework to categorise rationalities as either technocratic, humanistic or emancipatory. Based on a series of semi-structured dialogic interviews, the article explores how key strategic and operational personnel within higher education institutions articulate their rationality for engaging with employability. It finds that the rationalities advanced to support employability within different institutions vary through a conversation between institutional culture and priorities and the demands of different stakeholders who the institution seeks to engage. The technocratic and humanistic rationalities dominate, with the emancipatory rationality weakly represented in the data. However, in many cases, the different rationalities are woven together, often for tactical reasons, to create bespoke institutional rationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between technocracy and populism during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis. On one hand, this relationship has been defined by populist denial, displacement of crisis, and rejection of the technocratic consensus on the need for urgent and decisive action in the face of the global pandemic. On the other hand, COVID-19 has also led to convergence between the two sides and populist approximation to technocracy more akin to 'technopopulist' compromises and politics. The article shows that this pattern of antagonism and approximation has been shaped by three constitutive features of the state of exception and emergency during the COVID-19 crisis: (1) discursive securitization of the threat, (2) the use of extraordinary tools and measures under the licence of precautionary principle, and (3) institutional concentration of power. While COVID-19 is an extreme case in all three respects, the lessons learned from the pandemic advance our general understanding of technocracy and populism as constitutive features of contemporary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" by Victor Seow explores the concept of "carbon technocracy," a technopolitical system that idealizes extensive fossil fuel exploitation. The book examines the development of carbon technocracy in East Asia, particularly in the Fushun coal mine in China. It analyzes the historical context of imperial extraction, nationalist reconstruction, and socialist industrialization in relation to carbon technocracy. The book also discusses missed opportunities for deeper analysis and the limitations of the author's arguments. Overall, "Carbon Technocracy" offers a unique perspective on the coevolution of technology and institutions in East Asia's energy regimes. [Extracted from the article]

This article aims to shed light on the so-called post-truth moment and the responses of Walter Lippmann, Carl Schmitt, and John Dewey to the unstable basis and implications of truth—empirical or scientific, moral and axiological—in politics. At stake historically and today is an attempt to find political authority grounded in truth so as to preserve an autonomous sphere of freedom for the individual against the potentially irrational subjectivism backed by coercive force. Lippmann and Schmitt mirror the contemporary distrust (or insistence as inescapable fact) of subjectivism and the rejection of pluralism as offering truth as an ordering principle for politics. I argue that Dewey's turn to inquiry and his conception of truth and politics provides a timely defense of participatory democracy and a democratic ethos necessary to commit to acting on verifiable truth claims. I conclude by applying Dewey's insights to current scholarship on truth, inquiry, and polarization today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The territorial composition of governments (that is, the geographical origin of its members) has received little attention from political scientists. However, prime ministers, ministers, and junior ministers clearly have a territorial characterization and preferential attachments to specific places that can potentially affect the way decisions are made and resources are allocated. In this article, we focus on these aspects, showing the evolution of the territorial representativeness of Italian governmental elites over the last four decades and proposing some interpretations of its changes. In particular, we describe the transition from a balanced regional representation (the "parity norm") to a multitude of different patterns of territorial representation that we observe across parties nowadays. We propose three explanations for such changes: the first is based on the transformation of the party system in the nineties, with the emergence of parties such as the Northern League, with a specific regional focus; the second is based on the regionalization of the Italian state and its consequences on political career paths; the third is based on the increasing recruitment of technocrats in ministerial offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many developing countries have, in recent years, adopted structural transformation strategies and strengthened state economic activism. While prima facie reminiscent of the post-war era's developmentalist strategies, contemporary industrial policies have resurfaced in a different environment: they are often designed and implemented in (newly) democratic, rather than authoritarian, political regimes. This paper argues that when democratic developing countries seek to (re)deploy industrial policies, governments must navigate the specific demands arising in an institutional setting in which political power is constrained and contestable. Therefore, the focus of the classical industrial policy literature on instrumental-rational, top-down, technocratic -policy-making, with centralised state–business relations, needs to adapt to this environment. This paper discusses how challenges to secure fiscal space, reach parliamentary consensus, and address diverse societal demands in a formal democratic institutional setting influence industrial policies in developing countries. We exemplify this using Indonesia as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how German technocrats created revisionist plans to "unscramble" Africa in the 1930s. In particular, it studies how their schemes emerged from the transnational Eurafrican movement in the interwar period. The mixture of technical expertise and imperial ideologies in Eurafrican planning made Eurafricanism remarkably elastic in political terms, connecting liberal democratic and fascist states in the interwar era. Bureaucrats and colonial thinkers in Nazi Germany helped produce such projects, but also oriented them toward the realization of fascist imperial goals, using Eurafricanism as a tool of territorial revisionism. As a result, the technopolitics of African infrastructure development both depended on and informed the knowledge and ideology that defined fascist geopolitics. Although these blueprints never came to fruition, they point to the importance of spatial categories and technopolitical actors in the ideology and practice of National Socialism. Further, Nazi planners' engagement with Eurafricanism indicates how interwar imperialism connected Nazi Germany to other imperial powers in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China" by Kai Jun Chen is a book that explores the emergence of a "technocratic culture" in China during the 1720s, focusing on the figure of Tang Ying. Tang Ying, a bannerman from a bondservant family attached to the Imperial Household Department, played a significant role in the Imperial Workshops and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory. The book examines Tang Ying's contributions to the development of a technocratic approach to statecraft, including archivist and ethnographic methods, experimental techniques, and a distinctive technocratic style in porcelain production. This interdisciplinary study sheds light on the overlooked contributions of bannermen technocrats to the Qing imperial project and will be of interest to scholars and enthusiasts of art history, material culture, and imperial state-formations. [Extracted from the article]

Technocracy has recently triggered growing scholarly interest, especially as an alternative form of ruling to both party government and populism. In the context of weakened parties-citizens links and increasing external constraints faced by Western European ruling parties, technocratic appointments might help deal with the responsibility-responsiveness dilemma highlighted by Peter Mair. However, research on the explanatory factors of technocratic appointments is still underdeveloped. This article argues that the recourse to technocracy is fuelled by electoral volatility. In contexts of high electoral turbulence – and even more when parties frequently enter or exit the party system – ruling parties turn to technocratic appointments to dilute responsibility. This expectation is tested through an original longitudinal multilevel dataset including 655 cabinets and 373 elections in 20 Western European countries from 1945 to 2021. The findings of this article contribute to the current debate on technocracy and shed new light on the general understanding behind political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should politicians, technocrats, or the free market guide the economic development of a developing country? The historical development paths of countries vary widely. Public opinion concerning development models also differs across space and over time. Using Chinese aid data from AidData and the second round Afrobarometer survey, we study how Chinese aid affects local preferences for economic leadership in sixteen African countries, 2000–2005. Our causal identification strategy is to compare the preferences of respondents who lived near an aid project site where a Chinese project had been implemented at the time of the interview (treated group) to individuals who lived close to a site where a Chinese project would be initiated shortly after the interview (control group). We find that Chinese aid increases the local population's support for economic experts to run the economy. World Bank aid, on the other hand, has no impact on local preferences for economic leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decisions made by the inhabitants of a city regarding their different urban affairs should correspond to participatory processes framed in the self-determination and autonomy of any country. However, in Latin America and particularly in Chile, decisions do not necessarily come from the citizens or from those who are in charge of making them. The objective of this research is to analyze the international trips of urban policies that have influenced technocrats or have intervened in their decisions through agreements with binding conditions from supranational organizations that mobilize ideas, resources, assistance and materials in decisions. urban in Chile. Under a methodology of emerging connections between public-private agents inspired by the framework of policy mobility -policy mobility-, this research used public and private sources to build different analysis matrices. The evidence sheds some light on how these international relations operate at an urban scale and how the agents establish networks, an infrastructure and technocratic materials that make up a topography/ topology of the expertocracy. The conclusions allow us to initially envision productive ways of identifying this type of aspects that integrate cities into circuits of knowledge and policies from other latitudes and that interfere not only in decisions on an urban scale, but also in international relations, the democratic processes of cities and their inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a Weberian ideal-type framework to capture elite strategies for managing hard Euroscepticism and their consequences for EU disintegration. It does so by drawing on policy evolution theory to conceptualise two ideal types representing contrasting strategies: taming Euroscepticism by technocratic adaptation or embracing it. This framework is used to analyse empirical examples that match these two ideal-type approaches respectively: France and the UK between 2004 and 17. The use of this framework is a novel way of explaining the evolution and differences between elite French and UK responses to hard Euroscepticism by showing how and why French EU policy remained intra-paradigmatic as compared to the paradigm shift of Brexit. This approach allows for a better understanding of the process and probability of EU disintegration by linking the latter to strategic policy choices. In a UK context, it also offers a way to anticipate the signals leading to a reversal of disintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa was created in 2015 to alleviate migratory pressures resulting from crisis situations in Africa. However, the crisis in Africa was largely a construct of the EU, which in 2015 faced pressure from Member States to react to increased migration flows to Europe. Drawing on the (de)politicisation literature and 23 original expert interviews, we show that the creation of the EUTF enabled the Commission to depoliticise the 'refugee crisis' by reframing migration as a technocratic problem requiring the use of development aid to address its root causes in Africa. This approach, however, reintroduced strategic considerations at the heart of development aid, evidencing a horizontal transfer of politicisation from the migration policy domain to the development policy area. Our findings extend recent debates on the internal-external nexus in EU policymaking by revealing how political constraints and blockages in the internal dimension motivate EU external engagement. We also contribute to the strategic politicisation management literature by highlighting the role of three facilitating (or inhibiting) factors behind the success (or failure) of (de)politicisation strategies, namely, the type of actors involved, the locale where the policy is implemented, and the salience and polarisation of the policy-domains involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of 'thin' anti-establishment supply assess mainly the extent of populist messages. This paper analyses the diversity of thin contestation beyond just populism. I conduct a content analysis of 142 social media campaigns by anti-establishment (AEPs) and conventional parties during 23 elections across Europe 2010–2019. We find that in addition to popular will and extra-political technocratic expertise, AEPs increasingly enacted exceptional political calling, depicted as necessary to revive 'true' formal-representative politics itself. Regression analysis shows that political vocation cues played an important auxiliary role in AEP mobilization strategies. On average, those AEPs across the political spectrum which used more political vocation messages performed better electorally ceteris paribus than those which used them less. Conventional parties instead did not universally benefit if they increasingly spotlighted thin messages. The salience of anti-establishment and populism-related rhetoric played a further role within particular AEP groups, but neither was significantly associated with stronger AEP performance altogether. In order to better understand recent political turbulence, it is therefore useful to account for more diverse thin contestation supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central bank independence (CBI) implies that elected governments delegate monetary policy to technocrats in central banks. I argue that given the substantial influence of monetary policy on consumption, investments, exchange rates, capital flows and government spending, all of which critically determine the performance of the economy, CBI can blur the lines of responsibility for economic performance between elected governments and central banks. It can thereby weaken voters' ability and willingness to electorally punish (or reward) governments on the basis of economic outcomes. Utilizing data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I test how CBI conditions the effects of macroeconomic performance on electoral support for incumbents in 38 countries from 1996 to 2016. The results show that CBI significantly attenuates the reward and punishment mechanism of elections based on economic records. The finding of this article sheds new lights on how the problem of democratic accountability caused by the rise of CBI actually materializes in elections, the most important sanctioning mechanism of democracy. Further, it identifies CBI as another crucial condition that can explain variations in the magnitude of economic voting across countries, as yet unexplored in the election literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the Progressive Era, revised scientific accounts of the connections between dust, germs, and disease recast debates over public health. The American School of Home Economics and other institutions affiliated with the emerging subfield of household bacteriology regarded detecting and eliminating pathogens as necessary means to achieve safer homes and communities. Although several historians have attributed the rise of early twentieth-century technocracy and the decline of grassroots health activism to germ theory, household bacteriology complicates this standard narrative. Educators like Sophronia Maria Elliott (1854–1942) rejected the command-and-control tactics of the "new" public health and instead instructed women how to culture microorganisms and to measure the risks of infection within their surrounding environments using kitchen experiments. Household bacteriologists aspired to train "sanitary citizens" with the right and the duty to test for germs with everyday equipment, to prevent disease with effective housekeeping, and to advocate for policies and infrastructure to keep society well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We aimed to predict the favor for a technocratic government in the context of the SARS‐CoV‐2 pandemic. Method: We tested a multilevel mediated moderated model on the ResPOnsE COVID‐19 data set (rolling cross‐section design, quota sample of the Italian adult population, N = 8210, data collected from March 17 to June 16, 2021). Results: Subjective vulnerability to COVID‐19 showed a positive relationship with trust in science and scientists, which, in turn, had a positive relationship with favor for a technocratic government, particularly among participants who had low trust in the Italian Parliament. The prevalence of COVID‐19 (measured at Level‐2, with data nested by day of data collection) also showed a positive association with favor for a technocratic government. Conclusion: The COVID‐19 pandemic may have jeopardized representative democracy: The objective and subjective threats it triggered favor trust in science and scientists that, when combined with a low level of trust toward political institutions, fosters the desire for a technocratic government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promise of an open cyberspace driven by an empowered generation of "digital natives" has collapsed, due to the corporate capture of the internet and the psychosocial immiseration of youngsters caused by the instrumental manipulation of them at the screen interface. Certain strands in the twentieth-century philosophy of technology can throw light on these developments in terms of (1) Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the expanding influence of 'Technik' tends toward the treatment of persons as exploitable things, or "standing reserve," and (2) Jacques Ellul's contention that humans would in time and of necessity assimilate themselves to vast and autonomous technological system. Young people are now being largely shaped by "social physics," as big data–derived fodder for the creation of a hive mind in the interests of technocratic social control and corporate profiteering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the debate surrounding and following the Brexit referendum in June 2016, credentialed economic expertise did not enjoy a privileged position within the political and policy debate. Using the contrasting cases of the Office for Budget Responsibility and Economists for Brexit/Free Trade, this paper explores the mobilisation of economic expertise within the discursive politics of Brexit under conditions of pervasive radical uncertainty. It argues that politicisation is an important factor in side-lining technocratic influence over policy choice, but that the particular type of politicisation in play (plebiscitary) meant that the input of technocratic experts was downgraded. It is a politics conducted in another register to the reasoned, evidence-based vernacular of accredited experts and the policy discourses that they work with and through. We also argue that the basic unknowability of the post-Brexit economy further impaired expert input. These limitations were acknowledged by accredited experts themselves, reducing their traction within the policy debate. This unknowability was exploited by forms of counter-expertise mobilised by the Leave campaign. The radical uncertainties of Brexit allowed in heterodox assumptions and approaches to compete on a level playing field with an approximation of what could be presented as prudent best practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Britain as elsewhere, planning systems are entering a "digital turn." However, the emerging conversations around PlanTech in policy, industry, and research yield contrasting views about the promises of digital technology and "data-driven" decisions to enhance and embed public participation in the planning system. With faster, data-driven processes capable of engaging more people in more diverse ways, PlanTech offers to revolutionise planning systems. However, empirical evidence demonstrates low citizen trust in government and web-based technologies, democratic and participatory deficits, the complexity of the planning system and its opaque technocratic terminology, multi-layered digital divides, and other socio-technical factors that hinder effective and inclusive public consultations in planning. This article provides a preliminary, high-level research agenda for public consultations across Britain's three nations that centres around a critical pragmatic design, deployment, and evaluation of blended/"phygital" (simultaneously physical and digital) information-rich ecologies of smart engagement. A review of selected national policy in Britain provides initial insight into the emphasis (or lack of) put on the adoption of digital tools within the planning process of each British nation. In doing so, the research sets out a conceptual model that complements existing models for participatory planning by adopting Beyon-Davies' unified conception of information, systems, and technology. The conceptual model presented sets out seven Is of information-rich phygital ecologies and three interdependent "pillars" for smart engagement that enable one to gaze both deeply and broadly into opportunities for smart engagement through and beyond PlanTech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular, digital discourse about climate fiction, much of which appeared since Hurricane Sandy. Instead of looking at individual works or narrating their history, I read this popular "metagenre" to draw out its implicit theory of the genre. According to the metagenre, climate fiction's abstract features consist of a didactic purpose and a normative form. Climate fiction's purpose, whatever its social effects, is ultimately to contribute to planetary climate stability. Second, the genre's definitive form is (or should be) extrapolative realism. Extrapolative realist narrative builds on scientific consensus to imagine plausible futures. The striking thing about climate fiction is that its purpose and form exist in a contradictory or inversely proportional relationship. If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish. If the climate continues to destabilize, then the genre's realism will have been vindicated at the expense of its purpose. Climate fiction is unique because it promises extrapolative realism in the content of individual novels and films but does so in the constitutive and paradoxical presence of a goal that would prevent such future climates from materializing. The point of analyzing climate fiction's constitutive paradox between purpose and realism is not to revel in irony, leave the final word to ideology critique, or dismiss the popular aesthetics of climate fiction. Rather, this paradox can be generalized to the worldview or grand narrative of the Anthropocene: the contradiction between climate fiction's purpose and form sheds light on a more general temporal structure bound up with technocracy and scientific legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a resurgent banking concept of education laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic. It uses the theories of Paulo Freire, Mark Fisher, Michel Foucault, and Saidiya Hartman to articulate how learning‐management systems undermine literary study's problem‐posing educational paradigm and how to retain it amid increasing technocratic pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bowing out of the designated successor to the leadership of the long-ruling People's Action Party, Heng Swee Keat, and thus the prime ministership of Singapore in April 2021 led to a sense of political crisis in the illiberal state. This article argues that this troubled third leadership transition was preceded and conditioned by the similarly troubled protracted first leadership transition in the 1980s and 1990s. The technocratic statecraft that framed the first transition is ill-adapted to tackle the new contentious politics that have gathered pace since the 2011 general election, thus engendering the sense of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change is an essential aspect of contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is increasingly recognized that the familiar 'information dump delivery mode' (as Timothy Morton calls it), through which new facts about ecological destruction are being constantly communicated, often contributes to anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, and can ultimately lead to hopelessness and paralysis in the face of ecological issues. In this article, I explore several pathways to approach EE, beyond the presentation and transmission of ecological facts. I position my conceptual discussion around my own teaching experiences speaking about climate change with undergraduate students across several Education classes through 2019 to 2021. I situate these reflections within the current discourse on education and teaching in/for the Anthropocene. Throughout this discussion, I locate various ways in which much EE fails to contribute to student's agency and empowerment by consistently reducing complex ecological phenomena to a set of problems, mainly economic/technological, to be fixed by technocracy. I propose that a contemplative–existential perspective to EE is capable of responding to these reductions, most basically by providing opportunities and practices for students to process their grief and other emotions through recognizing the Anthropocene as an inescapable reality, but also a reality that cannot be determinately imagined or predicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]