Defending Democracy Against Technocracy and Populism: Deliberative Democracy's Strengths and Challenges

According to many commentators in political science and the media, the populist successes we have witnessed in recent years constitute a kind of ‘backlash’ against (neo-)liberal, technocratic and perhaps even post-democratic institutions. However, several authors have also outlined similarities between technocracy and populism as threats to representative party democracy (Urbinati, 2014, Bickerton and Accetti, 2017, Caramani, 2017). Despite subtle differences between these diagnoses, they converge on the judgment that technocracy and populism are essentially anti-political visions of collective decision-making, postulating a ‘unitary, general, common interest of a given society (a country).’ (Caramani, 2017: 60) We follow this line of argument and present deliberative democracy as vindicating the value and importance of pluralism, mediation and representation and thus as a defense of party democracy against both populism and technocracy. Adopting a Habermasian, systemic understanding of deliberative democracy, we view deliberative democracy as a normative reconstruction of representative democracy. Yet while this systemic perspective has the potential to reappraise the intrinsic value of democratic procedures, it also runs a risk of institutional conservatism: As Owen and Smith have argued, it might, whether inadvertently or not, end up justifying existing deficiencies of democracy as functional to deliberation and thus effectively de- politicizing institutional design (Owen and Smith, 2015). We thus argue that the ultimate challenge for deliberative democracy may lie in defending the procedural consensus on which representative party democracy rests against populism and technocracy – while at the same allowing for democratic innovations and processes of re-constitutionalization that enable a renewal of the procedural consensus.