By In 2010, Greece faced a sovereign debt crisis that threatened to crush its economy and destabilize the eurozone. To secure emergency loans, the Greek government agreed to a bailout program, administered by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, together called the “Troika.” The bailout came with strict conditions, forcing Greece to implement austerity measures, including pension cuts and tax increases. By 2015, after years of economic decline and rising unemployment, the populist Syriza party came to power promising to return decision-making authority to Greek people.
When Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected austerity in the 2015 referendum, European technocrats imposed even harsher terms. The policy may have been economically strong, but its political consequences were disastrous, entrenching populist power and showing voters that their elected politicians were powerless against external bureaucrats. The paradox that technocratic governance can simultaneously be necessary, and is central to the contemporary crisis of liberal democracies in Europe.
Today, illiberalism and populist movements are gaining ground, fueled by widespread dissatisfaction with institutions citizens perceive as unresponsive and unable to translate popular demands into public policy. Populist movements have emerged as outlets for this frustration, blaming unelected technocrats for removing decision-making power from ordinary citizens and for advancing the interests of entrenched elites.
At the same time, the rise of populism has reinforced the appeal of bureaucratic institutions among a different segment of the electorate, where they are seen as a necessary check on populist impulses and a means of protecting policymaking from overpoliticization and short-term political interests. This creates a vicious cycle: populism strengthens technocracy, which in turn fuels more populism.
Expertise as Solution and Problem
In recent years, governments across Europe have increasingly turned to technocrats, independent specialists,and non-partisan institutions, in areas from economic policy to public health. Central banks, regulatory agencies, and expert-led ministries have gained greater influence, demonstrating a growing belief that responsible governance requires professional expertise to navigate modern complexity.
This shift reflects genuine realities of contemporary governance. Representative politics inherently operate within electoral cycles, where politicians must balance long-term policy needs and short-term political survival. Policymaking can also be captured by powerful factions, favoring dominant social groups at the expense of minorities. In an era of unprecedented complexity, many areas, including financial system stability and pandemic response, genuinely require specialized knowledge that exceeds the capacity of elected officials. Expert-led institutions, insulated from these pressures, can focus on rationality and long-term welfare and may actually be better able to deliver common good.
Yet the insulation of bureaucratic governance from democratic politics is also its principal political vulnerability. While experts are shielded from electoral pressures, they are not immune to other, less transparent influences. Experts can be biased, arising from professional networks or ideology or can be captured by powerful stakeholders. Despite promising to serve the common good above factional interests, they may in fact advance the interests of an even smaller constituency.
This creates a perception that citizens have been excluded from decisions affecting their lives, their voices sidelined in favor of the supposed neutrality of unelected officials. This sentiment is effectively exploited by populist politicians to challenge the liberal institutional system as a whole.
Rise of Technocratic Policymaking in Europe
The increasing reliance on bureaucratic and technocratic governance in European politics emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. As countries battled with political and economic instability throughout the 2010s, governments turned to expert-led administrations, viewing them as essential stabilizers.
The EU has frequently been identified as a political system that relies on expertise in a particularly systemic way, with significant decision-making power delegated to so-called eurocrats in the European Commission or the European Central Bank. In the context of the EU, technocratic governance is closely linked to the pooling of sovereignty by member states and the progressing deepening of supranational integration. As policy is developed increasingly through multi-level governance, the visibility and influence of technocratic actors have grown in parallel.
The 2008 crisis brought these dynamics to the forefront, reminding member states of the binding commitments they made upon joining the eurozone. The insulation of executive bodies enabled fast, coordinated responses to prevent economic collapse. At the same time, the bypassing of national democratic institutions and popular dissent against austerity measures resulted in tensions between democratic participation and European policy coordination. Nevertheless, crisis management has led to greater, rather than declining supranationalization of policy in the years since, reinforcing the powers of non-elected institutions.
The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic further illustrates both the necessity and the political fragility of technocratic governance. In the context of the crisis the necessity of objective scientific advice became clear, and political elites across Europe found it unavoidable to rely on expert knowledge in navigating unprecedent public health challenges.
The pandemic, however, also exposed the limits of expert governance, challenged simplistic assumptions about the existence of a unified expert consensus or a single “correct” solution. Disagreement among experts revealed the contested nature of science, as well as how different models, assumptions and world views may shape expert decision-making. Scientific advice and models were often used selectively by political actors, who sought to legitimize policy preferences, highlighting the limits of expert independence and how science can become politicized.
When expert-led policies failed to deliver clarity and success, they generated dissatisfaction with political elites and incumbents, in numerous cases contributing to the advancement of populist movements.
Technocracy claims superior competence and neutrality, but when it fails to deliver outcomes consistent with this promise, the credibility gap is larger than in ordinary politics, precisely because their legitimacy is based on their supposed capability of making the perfect choices in governance.
Together the financial and COVID crises showcase a troubling pattern where technocratic governance responds to genuine needs and complex problems exceeding the capacity of elected politicians, yet the very insulation that underpins their effectiveness generates populist backlash.
The growing tension between technocracy and populism is, in reality, a tension within liberal democracy itself.
A Challenge to Liberal Democracy
Technocracy and populism can both be seen as challenging liberal democracy, but in fundamentally different ways. Liberal democracy, as a cohesive whole, can essentially be undermined in two ways: democracy can be illiberal, or liberalism can be undemocratic. An illiberal democracy lacks liberal institutions that protect the rule of law and guarantee individual rights, running the risk of turning into the “tyranny of the majority,” a political system where minority interests are sidelined in favor of the majority population. On the other hand, liberal regimes can be undemocratic, where politicians fail to represent the views of their electorate or the parliament’s power is constrained, resulting in a political system where citizens lack the power to influence decision-making.
The gradual divergence of liberalism and democracy might be precisely what the clash between populism and technocracy demonstrate.
Populist movements loudly and proudly champion the establishment of a majoritarian democracy and illiberalism by sidelining liberal institutions and reducing the emphasis on equality by granting majority interests more importance. Technocratic governance, on the other hand, challenges democracy in a much less transparent way: it claims democratic legitimacy, not on the basis of being elected, but by promising to have the expertise to make the best-informed decisions and deliver the collective good of the society (Mounk, 2018, p. 6). This claim naïvely overlooks the possibility, that these unelected experts may be influenced by powerful stakeholders or have interests and objectives of their own. Although this might not be straightforward, recently there is more and more academic interest in examining the undemocratic nature of bureaucratic expert governance taking decision-making power from the parliament and elected politicians.
Relationship Between Populism and Technocracy
The commonality between populism and technocracy is then obvious: they both stem from a dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, questioning its viability and the mutual dependence of its two parts – liberalism and democracy. The alternatives they propose are, however, fundamentally opposed, and in advancing their own respective truths, they simultaneously challenge and reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle.
Technocracy claims that politicians are corrupted by self-interest and a desire to stay in power, dependent on election cycles and succumbing to dominant factions in society to the detriment of the common good and minorities. To safeguard from this, they seek to depoliticize vulnerable areas of policymaking, placing decision-making power in the hands of expert bureaucrats with the promise of outcomes that will benefit the greater good of society.
In the process however, people are left feeling powerless and ignored, excluded from decision-making and deprived of their rights as citizens.
This frustration seems to be acknowledged only by populist leaders who claim to end elite gatekeeping and restore a purer form of democracy. Populist movements thus emerge as emotional responses to perceived political irrelevance. They present themselves as representing the popular voice and champion majoritarian institutions, responding to real grievances caused by exclusion and the feeling of being unheard, but at the same time undermine the equality of liberalism and threaten to bring majoritarian dominance with possible disastrous consequences.
Mainstream politicians, fearing the “tyranny of the majority” and the democratic backsliding populist movements promise to attempt to shield policymaking by reinforcing experts’ role in policymaking and transferring more power to them. This, however, only serves to deepen democratic deficits, therefore strengthens the argument made by populist movements. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of insulated policymaking and populist backlash, threatening the stability of liberal political institutions.
Conclusion
In European democracies two parallel processes are playing out. On the one hand, the preferences of citizens are growing increasingly illiberal: voters are dissatisfied with the work of independent institutions and seem less tolerant towards the protection of the rights of ethnic and other minorities. On the other, political elites have growing power over the political system, making it progressively less responsive to citizens. Those in positions of power appear increasingly unwilling to accommodate the views of the public, often because of its illiberal nature. As a consequence, tensions are intensifying between liberalism and democracy, the two pillars of the contemporary political order.
In the long term, neither alternative to liberal democracy appears stable. Illiberal democracy risks deteriorating into unconstrained majority rule, while the anti-pluralist, and often autocratic tendencies of populist movements threaten to erode democracy itself, as numerous historical examples demonstrate. Conversely, unrepresentative liberalism is unlikely to prove more durable. History suggests that humans are prone to self-interest, making them unreliable representatives of society’s collective interests. Liberalism without democracy thus risks becoming a political system dominated by billionaires and technocrats, with the temptation to exclude people from more and more areas of policymaking.
This is not to say that technocracy is inherently corrupt or devoid of value. There are policy areas where expert policymaking plays a key role. Expert knowledge is regularly consulted to address issues of economic, political, or health emergencies that elected official regard as exceeding their own expertise. It is also apparent that politically salient policy areas, vulnerable to short-term electoral pressures, require impartial regulating and balancing.
The central challenge to contemporary democracies, then, is not choosing between technocracy and populism, but finding a way employ expertise without hollowing out the popular legitimacy on which it depends.
