Technopopulism: the new logic of democratic politics

Democratic politics has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades. The structuring logic of political competition is no longer the ideological struggle between left and right. Political actors today compete in their appeals to ‘the people’ and to competence and expertise as supreme political virtues. The substance of contemporary democratic politics is these populist and technocratic claims, giving rise to a political logic which we call technopopulism. In this lecture, Christopher Bickerton will define the concept of technopopulism and differentiate it from the ideological political logic that dominated the 20th century. He will then discuss a variety of different ways in which populist and technocratic appeals have been combined into a single political offer, using as the principle examples the United Kingdom, Italy and France. The lecture will conclude with a reflection on the challenge technopopulism poses to representative democracy. This lecture is based on a book of the same title, co-authored by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti (CUNY), forthcoming from Oxford University Press in early 2021.

Christopher Bickerton is Reader in Modern European Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge and an Official Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2008 and since then has held teaching positions at Oxford, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Sciences Po in Paris. He has published numerous books and articles that span a number of different fields within social and political science. These include two research monographs, European Union Foreign Policy: From Effectiveness to Functionality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; paperback in 2015) and European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States (Oxford University Press, 2012). His 2012 book on state transformation was awarded the Best Book prize by the University Association of Contemporary European Studies. His articles have been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Political Studies, International Politics and the Revue Française de Science Politique. In 2011, he co-edited a special issue in JCMS on the EU’s security and defense policy (with Bastien Irondelle and Anand Menon). In 2016, he published the best-selling The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide with Penguin, which was submitted for the Baillie-Gifford prize, the UK’s leading non-fiction literary prize. His book (co-authored with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti) is to be published with Oxford University Press, entitled Techno-Populism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (2020). His next book project is a history of Europe since 1989, to be published by Allen Lane (Penguin). Beyond academic publishing, he has written articles for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, New York Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Big Issue and is regularly interviewed for national and international radio.

Online seminars are organized through Zoom. Registration is required in order to receive access information. Link to the registration is available HERE.