Experts and the people: technocrats in government and the shifting patterns of political participation

Abstract

Technocracy has become an increasingly salient feature of contemporary European democracies, yet its implications for political participation remain insufficiently explored. This article examines how the growing presence of technocratic ministers in government is associated with citizens’ political participation across Europe. Drawing on individual-level data from the European Values Study (2017–2018) and original measures of technocratic appointments as ministers, the analysis distinguishes between conventional and unconventional forms of participation. Technocratic exposure is operationalised as an exponential moving average of the proportion of technocratic ministers in government between 2000 and 2018 and analysed using hierarchical linear mixed models. The findings show no robust direct association between technocratic presence and conventional participation. By contrast, unconventional participation follows a non-linear pattern, increasing at moderate levels of technocratisation and declining as technocratic presence becomes more entrenched. These relationships are conditioned by distributive value orientations: among egalitarian citizens, higher technocratic presence is associated with lower engagement in both participation modes, while individualistic citizens display a modest increase in unconventional participation at high levels of technocratisation. The article highlights how technocratic governance reshapes, rather than uniformly depresses, patterns of political engagement.