Kettle Logic

This article unearths the political logic of the police kettle. Rather than add to the mundane debate about civil liberties or models of policing, this article argues that the kettle reveals nothing less than the police war at the heart of modernity. This is a police war carried out as a logic of containment against the enemy within—within the kettle and within society. The kettle is a microcosm of the police war of containment.

Conclusion

This conclusion outlines the most recent incarnations of technopopulism. Since technopopulism is not vested in any particular politician or party but as a political logic operates in a way that shapes the constraints and incentives political actors face, the precise identity of technopopulists and the synthesize they achieve between technocracy and populism will change over time. The conclusion then takes up the question of the whether technopopulism can endure as a political logic. Using the corona virus crisis as its starting point, and based on the normative discussion of technopopulism in chapter five, the conclusion looks at various ways in which we may go beyond technopopulism. We conclude that whereas technopopulism is an unstable political logic, there are good reasons to think that it will endure and continue to shape and structure political attitudes and behaviour well into the future.

The Origins of Technopopulism

This chapter examines the origins of the technopopulist political logic. It does so by identifying the origins and principal contours of the ideological political logic which preceded it. It then explores the relative decline of the ideological logic and the rise of technopopulism. The technopopulist logic has superimposed itself upon the ideological logic, leading to a complex interaction between the two. The theme of the chanpter is the formation and decline of organizing interests and the complex relationship between societal change and evolutions in national political party systems. The overarching narrative is of the separation of state from society (referred to process of disintermediation) and the connection of this to technopopulism. The rise of the technopopulist political logic is associated with a number of macro-historical processes, such as secularization, cognitive mobilization, and the decline of organized interests. However, the relationship between these processes and the rise of technopopulism is shaped by nationally specific experiences. The empirical focus of the chapter is on British, French, and Italian politics, but the argument refers also to broader changes that held across national political systems in Western Europe since 1945.

The Concept of Technopopulism

This chapter offers a formal definition of the concept of technopopulism. We begin by surveying the various ways in which this concept has already been employed in the existing academic literature. Since we identify several layers of confusion in this domain, we propose to systematize it by defining technopopulism as an organizing logic of electoral competition based on the combination of populist and technocratic discursive tropes and modes of political organization. To clarify what we mean by this, we first explain what we take an organizing logic of electoral competition to be. We then offer formal definitions of the two main modes of political action that characterize the technopopulist political logic; i.e. populism and technocracy. Finally, we contrast the technopopulist political logic with what we take to be its main historical antecedent and contemporary rival; that is what we call the ideological political logic.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book as a whole. It situates the main argument of the book within the ongoing debate about the state of democracy, arguing that we are witnessing a transformation of democracy rather than a collapse or end of democracy. The chapter outlines the main features of this transformation, namely the emergence of a new political logic where appeals to expertise and to ‘the people’ are combined in a variety of different ways. We call this new logic technopopulism. The chapter gives examples of technopopulism and highlights the differences with the ideological political logic that preceded it. The chapter gives a synthesized account of the explanations for the emergence of technopopulism and the consequences associated with its development. The chapter ends by considering possible ‘ways out’ of the technopopulist political logic.

Technopopulism

Technocratic appeals to expertise and populist invocations of ‘the people’ have become mainstays of political competition in established democracies. This development is best understood as the emergence of technopopulism—a new political logic that is being superimposed on the traditional struggle between left and right. Political movements and actors—such as Italy’s Five Star Movement and France’s La Républiqe En Marche—combine technocratic and populist appeals in a variety of ways, as do more established parties that are adapting to the particular set of incentives and constraints implicit in this new, unmediated form of politics. In the first book-length treatment of the phenomenon of technopopulism, the authors combine theoretical and historical approaches, offering a systematic definition of the concept of technopopulism, while also exploring a number of salient contemporary examples. The book provides a detailed account of the emergence of this new political logic, as well as a discussion of its troubling consequences for existing democratic regimes. It ends by considering some possible remedies moving beyond the simplistic idea that in the right ‘dose’ populism and technocracy can counter-balance one another.