It Takes Two to Tango: The Technocracy-populism Nexus in Italy and the EU from a Critical-realist Perspective

The nexus between technocracy and populism in Italy can be better understood from a long-term perspective. Adopting a critical-realist approach to the explanation of political change, it is possible to identify the main contextual factors that favoured, from the early 1990s, the rise of these two alternative yet compatible logics of politics, which can be conceived as both causes and symptoms of the fatigue of representative democracy. This also allows (i) a better understanding of the entanglement of populism and technocracy after the global crisis of 2008, and (ii) the conceptualisation of the position of the European Union (EU) as a catalyst of these processes within a multi-level spatial nexus.
Keywords: technocracy; populism; Italy; European Union; critical realism