Christopher J. Bickerton, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Technopopulism. The New Logic of Democratic Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 256.

Abstract

Technopopulism has the ambitious goal of extrapolating and conceptualizing the contemporary “logic” of democratic politics. More precisely, a “political logic” is taken to be the “contextually and historically specific set of incentives and constraints, which affects the way in which rival contenders for public office compete with one another in the electoral sphere, independently of their substantive policy goals” (p. 21). Christopher Bickerton’s and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti’s main claim is that despite the frequent opposition of technocracy and populism in public and academic discourse, current democratic politics is best described as dominated by a technopopulist logic, which requires political actors to make use of both populist and technocratic tools to claim to be legitimately representing the people as a whole. The authors make their point by successfully interweaving an insightful conceptual framework with an informed historical narrative. Despite the diverse topics broached by the book, it maintains clarity and organic unity throughout, which give substance to the book’s ambitious claims. The work is structured roughly in three thematic blocks dedicated to the conceptualization (Ch. 1-2), contextualization (Ch. 3-4), and evaluation (Ch. 5) of the technopopulist political logic.