Claims about the ‘rise of the technocrats’ have a long history and have recently gained new attention in the context of debates on economic policy, neoliberalism and the mounting conflict between technocracy and populism. Against this background, we conduct the first comprehensive study of technocratic dominance in a national power elite, based on unique bibliographical and relational data on the 423 individuals in the Danish power elite, as well as in-depth interviews with 30 of its most prominent members. On the level of overall elite composition, half of the Danish power elite is found to match the professional identity of a technocrat, although subject to significant sectoral variation, based on educational background and experience from technocratic career hubs. The qualitative data indicates that professional identity can be linked to technocratic ideology and preferences for depoliticised governance, but also provides evidence of a near-consensus on progressive managerialism, paternalistic elitism and centrist pragmatism, which include members of the power elite not formally trained as technocrats. We suggest that this calls for increased attention to the way in which economic policies and crisis management are shaped by broader technocratic ideology and beliefs, which are part of a mounting conflict with populism.

The role of street-level bureaucracy in social policy has been taken up by two relatively distinct streams of research, based on Lipsky’s foundational work (2010). One group of literature has focused on the organizational working conditions, practices and coping mechanisms of street-level bureaucrats, their impact on the implementation of political programs and reforms, and the scope for discretion in the face of political pressures and institutional demands (Brodkin and Marston, 2013; Jessen and Tufte, 2014; Breit et al., 2016; Van Berkel et al., 2017; van Berkel, 2020). Starting from a focus on interaction with clients and the direct impact of discretionary decisions ‘on people’s lives’ (Lipsky, 2010, 8), a second group of studies has focused more on differences in allocation of benefits caused by perceived ‘deservingness’ and discrimination among street-level bureaucrats (Altreiter and Leibetseder, 2014; Terum et al., 2018; Jilke and Tummers, 2018).

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.

The article argues for a revised research on behavioral public policy focused on the core claim and sine qua non of a behavioral “revolution”: the ability to produce equal or better outcomes with less stringent policy designs than in traditional solutions, at least for certain types of problems. Three contributions to such an agenda are proposed. First, the article argues that the growing focus on the evaluation of real-world behavioral policy programs, as opposed to experimental studies within specialized areas of research, calls for a corresponding theoretical orientation toward existing literature on policy tools and design. Second, a doctrine of policy design is extrapolated from the broader behavioral paradigm and specified in relation to four general areas of application. These provide an essential context for the evaluation of the behavioral claim to improved policy design and highlight that behavioral successes may well, contra this claim, be a result of a de facto increase in stringency vis-à-vis traditional responses. Third, the article proposes a new and substantially revised inventory of the behavioral toolbox, which specifies the stringency, mechanisms, and potential costs of different behavioral tools and techniques, which is both essential to the evaluation of the behavioral claim and necessary to overcome the arbitrariness and mistakes of existing inventories.

Setting a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, the book shows that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation. Esmark examines the development since the 1980s of a new 'post-industrial' technocratic regime and its complicity in the populist backlash against politics and political elites that is visible today. The new technocracy – a combination of network governance, risk management and performance management – has, the author argues, abandoned the overtly anti-democratic sentiments of its industrial predecessor and proclaimed a new partnership with democracy. The rise of populism, however, is a clear sign that the inherent problems of this partnership have been exposed and that technocracy posing as democracy will only serve to exacerbate existing problems.

Explores the link between technocracy and the rise of populist movements and parties in established democracies during the last two decades. Among the various attempt to find the causes of this populist challenge, the chapter singles out the interplay of technocratic depoliticization and populist repoliticization as the key dynamic. Building on existing observations of this logic in the debates on populism and anti- politics, the chapter explores how the new technocratic preoccupation with network organization, reflexive risk regulation and experimental performance calculation have all contributed in particular ways to depoliticization, which in turn has led to populist counter- reactions and attempts at repoliticization.

The new technocratic pursuit of an imperative but difficult transition to a network state in the ‘information age’ is analyzed. Focusing on the interplay between technology and organization, the chapter argues that the new technocracy is defined by a new commitment to the power of networks, in stark contrast to the earlier preoccupation with large- scale and vertically integrated bureaucratic organization. Three types of new governance particularly invested in this development are discussed in more detail: communicative governance, collaborative governance and multilevel governance.

The introduction provides a starting definition of technocracy as a form of government based on a vision of politics as a form of (post-) industrial management, technological progressivism, social engineering, scientism and the politics of depoliticization. The transition from industrial technocracy to the anti-bureaucratic and pro-democratic form of new technocracy is introduced and situated in relation to key debates. Also includes an overview of the book.

The article investigates the contribution of the nudging agenda to communicative governance and policy design through the extensive use of substantial communicative tools, complementing the use of procedural communicative tools associated with network facilitation and management in post-NPM thinking. This argument is carried out on three levels of analysis: I) the reliance on information as the primary tool of government and the corresponding reversal of the conventional governmental toolbox, II) the development and use of informational and communicative techniques guiding behaviour, and III) the instruments, interfaces and artefacts supporting the informational networks and flows of nudging interventions.

This chapter reflects on reasons for neoliberalism’s surprising resiliency in the post-financial crisis period, such as its deep institutionalisation at both the national and international levels and the absence of major hegemonic rivals. It also considers whether Brexit and Corbynism might, at long last, spell the end of the neoliberal experiment in British politics.

It took the dramatic rise of populist parties and movements across the Western hemisphere to generate even modest academic acknowledgement of the fact that liberal democracies have for a long time been submitted to an altogether different system of rule: that of technocracy. After a period of relatively sustained interest in the subject in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, serious debate about technocracy effectively died out together with the enthusiasm for the planning and social engineering model assumed to be the essence of the technocratic project. However, technocracy has gradually entered the debate again through the backdoor, that is to say as an explanation for the mounting populist challenge (Müller 2016, Urbinati 2014, Bickerton and Accetti 2017). To be sure, there were precursors to this development, in particular the characterization of the EU as the ‘ultimate technocratic project’ (Schmidt 2006) generating the kind of national backlashes that ultimately gave us Brexit. Similarly, the arrival of Donald Trump was not entirely unforeseen, given that the political system of the U.S. had already been described as a destructive spiral of technocracy and populism (Fukuyama 2014).

The article contributes to the growing literature on framing of deservingness as an alternative to ‘blame avoidance’ strategies in the politics of welfare retrenchment. In particular, the article focuses on the interplay between political framing and media framing. Based on an analysis of two major welfare reforms involving reductions of social benefits in Denmark in 2005 and 2013, the article analyses the frames used by politicians supporting and opposing reform, as well as the frames used by the media. The article shows, first, that political reforms reducing social benefits are followed by increased framing of recipients as undeserving. The article finds a strong correlation between the political objective of reducing benefits and the reliance on frames that position recipients as undeserving. Second, the article shows that media framing remains significantly different from political framing in both years. However, the results also show that the media become less critical and more prone to frame recipients as undeserving along with the changes in political framing. Third, the article shows that media coverage of retrenchment reforms will be more critical under conditions of political conflict than in the case of political consensus. However, this result is also qualified by the observation that the media increasingly seek outside sources in order to find alternative voices under conditions approximating political consensus.

The article argues that recent decades of administrative policy and reform have led to the emergence of a late modern technocracy, defined by the intersecting ideas and principles of connective governance, risk management, and performance management. Connectivity, risk, and performance have remained consistent concerns across the various market-based and/or network-based alternatives to bureaucracy found in New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms. In contrast to the image of a flexible compromise between bureaucracy, markets, and networks prevailing in current debate, the article suggests that the long-standing tension between technocracy and bureaucracy are of vital importance to the administrations of advanced liberal democracies. Indeed, the partial compromise between technocracy and bureaucracy reached in the earlier creation of a "techno-bureaucracy" designed for planning and social engineering has been largely supplanted by a more adversarial stance towards bureaucracy in late modern technocracy due to the requirements of connectivity, risk, and performance.

In contrast to the widely voiced notion about a current neoliberal hegemony, the article seeks to demonstrate that the distinctly liberal form of governmental rationality and practice is neither neoliberal, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, nor hegemonic. Rather than a minimal government pursuing laissez-faire politics, liberal government is an ‘omnipresent’ form of government aiming to widen and deepen a particular regulatory game of freedom and security. Important as this form of omnipresent government may currently be, however, it is also limited by the persistence and pervasiveness of the key historical alternatives to liberal government: domination, democracy, and discipline.

This paper critically assesses the implications of the "good governance" program and its underpinning network approach to public governance—that is, the increased reliance on more or less informal networks as a way to mobilize and engage citizens, firms, and organizations in the development, implementation, and monitoring of public policy. We begin by positioning the network approach to public governance within the broader notion of an emerging network society. Second, we present the claim that, on a systemic level, the result of the network paradigm and good governance as a reorientation of the political system from "politics-policy" to "policy-politics." Third, we highlight the normatively ambiguous nature of the network paradigm and good governance, based on a discussion of the two major critical positions: governmentality studies and critical theory. Finally, we suggest some initial guidelines on how to pursue a theory of ethical political action within the parameters of the network paradigm.

The advent of network society – or control society (Deleuze 1995) – poses a challenge to critical theory and practice insofar as it suggests an appropriation of democratic vocabulary and the critical imaginary by a new managerial paradigm of ‘good governance’, hailing empowerment, individual freedom, creativity and self-governance framed by the democratic vocabulary of participation, transparency and accountability. Good governance relies instruments of governance that nurtures and strategically utilizes the self-governing potential of civil society under the strategic supervision of public authorities, seen in such diverse areas as employment policy, police power and crime prevention, health policy and biopolitics, employment policy, educational policy, accounting practices etc. (Bang and Esmark, 2009).

The fact that political parties and to some extent also the various parts of the executive and the legislative branch have more or less consistently tried to increase their strategic capacity to influence the public agenda is largely undisputed (Norris, 2000; Louw, 2005; Negrine, 2008). This development is seen to have taken off in the 1990s (Norris, 2000) as part of the adaptation to the “imperatives of the professionalization” of political advocacy and publicity, which constitutes one of the most prominent dynamics of the politics-media relationship in the current “age” of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999, p. 214). Other aspects of the professionalization trend notwithstanding, the accelerated pursuit of agenda-setting through the management of communication content (issue selection, priming, framing, simplification, personal focus, negative campaigning, etc.) and media relations (network-building, selective liaising with journalists, leaking, event creation, damage control, etc.) can be said to constitute the core of current communication strategies employed by political actors.