A technocratic zeitgeist? Testing if political parties are using more technocratic rhetoric in parliamentary debates

Party government is under attack from all sides, or so it seems. Firstly, the inherently domestic nature of party government is threatened by binding international treaties and institutions that prescribe much of a country’s fiscal and budgetary policies. This comes on top of a second threat in the economic sphere, namely corporations that are financially more powerful than many nation-states and that can therefore influence regulatory and labour policies. These international and financial capitalist threats undercut parties’ policy-making power and will inevitably lead them to break campaign promises. Moreover the complexity of these issues may simply be too much for political representatives to handle. This could lead political parties to value the advice from experts more than before and turn to more technocratic solutions in parliament. A second and third threat come from populism on the one hand and technocracy on the other. Caramani (2017) presented these two ideologies as taking issue with political parties’ linking function and party government’s pluralism in particular. If the exaggerated responsiveness and electoral success of populist parties lead to an inability to govern, while experts and bureaucrats lay the blame for this standstill at the feet of political parties in general, do these then respond with more responsible, technocratic language of their own? A fourth threat to political parties is the polycrisis we seem to find ourselves in, from the recent Covid-19 pandemic and impending climate breakdown to wars that are always on the verge of escalating. If the problems become too big to handle, do parties use output legitimacy as a reason to give more unmediated authority to experts? Using Bertsou and Caramani’s (2020) measurement of technocracy and a common sense definition of the word, a dictionary will be created through which speech in the Dutch parliament (Tweede Kamer, or Lower House) will be analysed and its technocratic nature assessed. The dictionary approach is a relatively simple way of using automated text analysis, the data is available from 1994 to 2019 (Parlspeech), and the Netherlands is a country where ‘good governance’ considerations have generally trumped representative concerns, making it a good test case. Bertsou, E., & Caramani, D. (Eds.). (2020). The technocratic challenge to democracy. London: Routledge. Caramani, D. (2017). Will vs. reason: The populist and technocratic forms of political representation and their critique to party government. American Political Science Review, 111(1), 54-67. Rauh, Christian; Schwalbach, Jan, 2020, "The ParlSpeech V2 data set: Full-text corpora of 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of nine representative democracies", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L4OAKN, Harvard Dataverse, V1