Technocracy: Does Rule By Experts Make Government Run More Efficiently?

In March 2016, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) announced that the public would be able to vote on the name of a new polar research vessel. Out of 7034 proposed names, one suggestion came out on top with a dominant plurality: Boaty McBoatface. Though the comical name itself is not a huge issue, it does showcase the inherent risk of asking the public what they think. Representative democracies empower voters to express their political opinions and have those opinions translated into policy by duly elected legislators; however, voters are also ill-informed about politics and have a questionable understanding of what’s at stake. 

Technocracy is often proposed as a supplement or alternative to democratic decision-making. Technocracy puts subject experts in consequential (usually unelected) positions and allows them to make policy decisions in their area of expertise. The idea is that their subject knowledge coupled with their lack of accountability to voters allows them to craft optimal policies without worrying about electoral backlash. For example, trained economists at the Federal Reserve can be the “grown-ups of economic policymaking” because they are not beholden to voters, meaning that they can enact unpopular but necessary monetary policies to improve the economy. But does technocracy really promote efficient and pragmatic policy? Does technocracy have a place in democratic societies? And how might populist criticisms limit technocratic power going forward?

Technocracy is a political system in which government policies are created by subject experts rather than elected politicians. For example, organizations like the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have a substantial impact on nations’ public policy, though their policy prescriptions are primarily made by unelected bureaucrats and experts. Technocratic decision-making also takes place at the national level, often in departmental or ministerial bureaucracies.

One reason many support technocracy is that technocrats’ decisions are not beholden to voters’ ever-evolving views on policy issues, which allows for an “administrative rationality” in policymaking that promotes good outcomes. David Mayhew contends that politicians’ proximate goal is reelection, meaning that all other concerns are secondary to their desire to be reelected. This creates some perverse incentives for politicians to pass short-sighted policies that endear themselves to voters. Voters are fickle, inconsistent, and often elevate politicians with diametrically opposed policy views to office, so this type of pandering leads to constant changes in policies that make long-term planning very difficult. Practically, this means that  many regulatory and policy goals that require long-term planning would be impossible if voters’ wishes were always taken into account.

In contrast, technocrats are not responsive to voters in the same way. While they have some incentives to take public opinion into account when creating policy, technocrats cannot easily be removed from office by aggrieved citizens. This means that they are generally more autonomous than elected politicians, and can enact unpopular but necessary policies (like spending cuts, new regulations, etc.) without public reprisals.

This insulation from voters is also good because, by definition, technocrats are more knowledgeable about policy issues than the vast majority of voters. Politics can seem complicated, intimidating, and nebulous to the average person. Academic research shows that many voters cannot answer basic civics questions, and their views are often informed by partisan misinformation and incorrect assumptions. This might cause them to support questionable policy positions. Career technocrats are highly knowledgeable about the topics they work on, and that depoliticized expertise helps them create optimal policy.

While some see rule-by-experts as a great way to ensure necessary but unpopular policies are carried out, others bemoan technocrats’ lack of electoral accountability and the resulting democratic deficit in policymaking. While elected politicians are beholden to voters’ (sometimes misguided) preferences, democratic elections confer a degree of legitimacy to officials’ decision-making. Elections provide politicians with an independent base of authority they can point to when someone asks “what gives you the right to make these decisions?”. In contrast, technocrats’ authority comes from a variety of sources mostly detached from voter preferences. Their jobs, and by extension their political influence, are never put to a popular vote, so there is not a clear mechanism through which voters can punish them for policies they disagree with. A weaker base of popular legitimacy can lead to a decline in political trust and more fragile governments, so a government run by unaccountable experts is not only an issue in principle, but could also negatively affect state health.

Additionally, while proponents of technocracy contend that rule by experts leads to impartial policy guided by subject knowledge, studies have shown that technocrats are an autonomous class with distinguishable policy preferences motivated by their own interests. Research on Latin American democracies finds that technocrats often leverage their subject expertise for political capital, which they then use to enhance their influence and jockey for their preferred reforms. This type of self-interested thinking undermines one of the primary appeals of technocracy and brings into question whether technocrats are actually more pragmatic and enlightened policy makers than their elected counterparts.

Many populist politicians and pundits have articulated these critiques of technocracy for a wider audience, hoping that a distaste for unelected elites will help improve their electoral prospects. Indeed, former U.S. President Donald Trump often criticized what he called a “criminal deep state” of bureaucratic experts for undermining his policy aims, and has questioned the need for technocratic expertise more broadly, saying of foreign policy experts “The experts are terrible…I met last week with a lot of people, all good people. But supposing I didn’t have one. Would it be worse than what we’re doing now?” Trump’s apparent disdain for technocrats is not an America-specific phenomenon. Jean Luc-Melenchon, a prominent left-wing opposition leader in France, has criticized the supposed neoliberal consensus perpetrated by EU technocrats. He has expressed his desire to “disobey” the EU’s rules and to “destabilize the Brussels machine” so France can enact a protectionist anti-austerity agenda. Populists on the left and right are mounting challenges to technocratic governance, and only time will tell whether these attacks shift power back to democratic legislatures.

The preceding paragraphs show that the push and pull between representative democracy and technocracy is alive and well. Proponents of technocracy suggest that its pragmatism and data-driven approach to policy-making allow for more efficient long-term reforms. In contrast, critics argue that unelected technocrats are not accountable to the people they represent, and that technocrats often have self-interested policy aims inconsistent with their supposed cold administrative rationality. But which argument do you find more compelling? The following questions will require you to evaluate all of the arguments presented to you, alongside data from the DCA tool, to determine whether technocracy helps or hurts governments.