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Technocracy, Trust and Democracy: Evidence on Citizens’ Attitudes from a Natural Experiment in Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2019

Silvia Merler Open the ORCID record for Silvia Merler [Opens in a new window]
Silvia Merler*
Affiliation:
Silvia Merler, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies – European and Eurasian Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Bologna, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Email: smerler1@jhu.edu
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Abstract

During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.

Keywords

democracytechnocracyeurocrisisEuropean politicsItalian politicsexperimental methods
Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 301 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2019. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press

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