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Abstract
Although populism and technocracy increasingly appear as the two organising poles of politics in contemporary Western democracies, the exact nature of their relationship has not been the focus of systematic attention. This article argues that whilst these two terms – and the political realities they refer to – are usually assumed to be irreducibly opposed to one another, there is also an important element of complementarity between them. This complementarity consists in the fact that both populism and technocracy are predicated upon an implicit critique of a specific political form, referred to in this article as ‘party democracy’. This is defined as a political regime based on two key features: the mediation of political conflicts through the institution of political parties and a procedural conception of political legitimacy according to which political outcomes are legitimate to the extent that they are the product of a set of democratic procedures revolving around the principles of parliamentary deliberation and electoral competition. This argument is made through a close analysis of works by Ernesto Laclau and Pierre Rosanvallon, chosen as exemplary manifestations of the contemporary cases for populism and technocracy, respectively.
Acknowledgements
The authors would both like to thank Richard Bellamy and one of the anonymous referees from CRISPP for their very helpful comments and suggestions on how to strengthen the arguments developed in this article. The authors would also like to thank Dr Paula Diehl and the participants of the Humboldt University political theory seminar in Berlin for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Manin Citation1997, pp. 206–218. For an extended and recent discussion, see Mair Citation2014, pp. 513–596.
2. We thank one of the reviewers for helping us sharpen this particular point.
3. For a fuller discussion of this way of understanding the notion of exemplarity see Ferrara Citation2008.
4. Though still very much neglected by political philosophers, political parties and partisanship have recently become the subject of a sustained and sophisticated interest on the part of some theorists (Muirhead Citation2006, Muirhead and Rosenblum Citation2006, Goodin Citation2008, Rosenblum Citation2008, White and Ypi Citation2010, Citation2011, Bader Citation2014, Bader and Bonotti Citation2014, White Citation2014). Whilst taking its inspiration for the above account of party democracy from this growing body of work, this paper puts less of an accent upon the subjective aspect of parties and partisanship. For example, Muirhead (Citation2006) writes about the ‘party spirit’ and stresses that what matters are not the unintended functions of party machines but rather the willed actions of partisans themselves (2006, p. 718). He also uses the language of ‘virtue’, ‘sympathy’ and stresses that partisanship is a behavioural disposition towards compromise and the need for ‘give and take’ in a democracy (2006,p. 719). White and Ypi (Citation2010) are also interested in particular in what they call a ‘democratic ethos’ and the role of parties in constructing this ‘positive conviction’ among citizens regarding their abilities as political agents (Citation2010, p. 809). This paper’s account of party democracy is more focused on its analytical features, identifying it as a particular institutional solution to the problem of the relation between whole and part in democratic political life.
5. On this point, see for instance Melenchon Citation2014 and Iglesias and Rivero Citation2014.
6. This is in fact the way in which Laclau appeared to understand his own argument. In a comment on his own theory published a few years after On Populist Reason, he explained that ‘political practices’ operate ‘at diverse points of a continuum whose two reductio ad absurdum extremes would be an institutionalist discourse, dominated by a pure logic of difference, and a populist one, in which the logic of equivalence operates unchallenged’. These two extremes, he felt, are ‘actually unreachable’: ‘pure difference would mean a society so dominated by administration and by the individualisation of social demands that no struggle around internal frontiers – i.e. no politics – would be possible; and pure equivalence would involve such a dissolution of social links that the very notion of “social demand” would lose any meaning’. (Laclau Citation2008, p. 45).
7. An entire section of his book is in fact dedicated to an analysis of the Lacanian theory of desire formation, through which Laclau argues that all desire is ultimately desire for a return to the original state of ‘fullness’ experienced in the mother’s womb. On this basis, he contends that the performative ‘success’ of any hegemonic claim to represent the social whole depends on its capacity to reactivate this original desire for ‘fullness’, while at the same time diverting it onto itself. For, as he puts it: ‘the desire to constitute a “people” … arises only when that original sense of fullness is experienced as lost, and partial objects within society (aims, figures, symbols) are so invested that they become the name of its absence’ (Laclau Citation2005, pp. 110–116).
8. For a more detailed exposition of this point, see Rosanvallon Citation1998.
9. In the context of Rousseau’s original theorization of the notion of popular sovereignty, for instance, the ‘executive’ (i.e. what he calls the ‘government’) is a ‘delegated’ power, which accordingly remains subordinate to that of the popular assembly (Rousseau Citation1997). Within the framework of Rosanvallon’s theory of democratic legitimacy, in contrast, popular sovereignty is effectively relocated at the level of the interplay between several competing instances of popular representation. This explains why, towards the end of his treatise on Counter-Democracy, Rosanvallon had already suggested that democratic theory should recover the classical republican ideal of a ‘mixed constitution’: ‘The idea of a mixed constitution’ he argued ‘arose in the Middle Ages in the course of the search for a regime that would combine the best features of aristocracy, democracy, and monarchy to create a polity as generous as it was rational. This idea is worth revisiting today, but with a somewhat different twist: democracy itself needs to be understood as a mixed regime, not as the result of a compromise between rival principles, such as liberty and equality, but rather as a composite of the three elements described above’ (Rosanvallon Citation2008, p. 314). This attempt to revise the older notion of the ‘mixed constitution’ and ‘mixed government’ is at the heart of Majone’s work on the European Union as a regulatory state. Majone distinguishes between the model of the separation of powers based on the principle of popular sovereignty and a ‘mixed government’ model based upon the representation of interests. See Majone Citation2005, pp. 46–51.
10. Such a ‘technocratic’ twist to the idea of popular sovereignty was in fact prefigured by Rousseau himself. In the chapter of the Social Contract devoted to the equivocal figure of the ‘Lawgiver’, he writes that: ‘By themselves, the people always will what is good, but they do not always discern it … They must accordingly be brought to see things as they are, and sometimes as they should be seen … Hence the necessity of a Lawgiver’, which is later described as an individual of ‘superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our true nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nonetheless make his happiness our concern’ (Rousseau Citation1968: 83–84). In the light of what has been stated above it is perhaps not entirely out of place to read this passage as containing many of the same ideas that Rosanvallon would later develop with respect to the idea of a ‘legitimacy of identification with generality’ and especially a ‘legitimacy of impartiality’. Moreover, this would appear to be confirmed by the section of his book that Rosanvallon devotes to a reconstruction of the idea of an independent bureaucracy in France, which links it to a specific appropriation of the Republican ideal of popular sovereignty encapsulated in the notion of a class of ‘jacobins of excellence’ (Rosanvallon Citation2011, pp. 38–43).