Chapter 3 shows how Prime Minister Modi’s government oscillates between populist anti-elitism and forms of technocratic expertise to produce a distinct form of nationalism that is both seemingly pragmatic and extremely ethnocentric. It starts off by looking at how policy organisations channel dominant policy debates in certain directions, enable particular classifications of target groups, and legitimise certain policy solutions while marginalising others. In opposition to scholarship that sees technocracy and populism as contradictory forces (see Laclau 2005; Rosanvallon 2011), this chapter argues that they have emerged as two complementary arms of governance in contemporary India: (1) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class, and religion; and (2) technocratic policy, which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. I emphasise the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content, yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement.

Chapter 1 examines India’s dominant technocratic paradigms of expertise in relation to the flurry of anti-intellectual movements in a global context that includes Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While in many of these instances a distaste of intellectuals emerges from mass anti-elitism or religious anti-rationalism, anger against intellectuals also stems from wanting to replace the disconnected ‘eggheads’ with the pragmatic businessman and rational technocrat. Cultural commentators have made pronouncements of ‘the end of politics’ as the result of capitalist instrumentality and economic rationalism in a range of political contexts. Significantly, however, I urge readers not to diagnose a depoliticisation, or ‘disappearance’, of politics in everyday life. Rather, I determine that it is incumbent upon social scientists to pay attention to what Havelka (2016) calls hérrschaft: ideas about how political life is organised, and how possibilities of social, cultural, and political futures are reframed.

The Member States of the European Union have created an internal market where movement of goods, services, persons and capital should be as easy across borders as it is within a single Member State. This is achieved by Treaty Articles which prohibit restrictions on free movement and discrimination, and by harmonisation. The process of harmonisation is complex and contested because it goes to the heart of how much power the EU has, and how much uniformity between Member States is required. The creation of common standards, although done by legislation, is a technocratic process in which it is sometimes claimed that non-scientific interests such as culture and identity are not adequately represented. As well as this, a well-functioning internal market has side-effects, such as regulatory competition, which put pressure on national standards and may undermine national preferences.

The chapter is devoted to the relationship between power and the cultural arena. The importance of public discourse, its requirements and limits, is illustrated. Gramscis notions of hegemony and dominance are applied, with modifications, to our analysis of power. The role of the masses is discussed, together with the notion of totalitarianism and the importance of culture in dictatorial regimes such as the fascist and Nazi ones. Different notions of civil society, as contrasted to the state, and its role are considered, then religion as a charismatic-traditional form of power. Technocratic knowledge leads to a discussion of the role of the elites. Specialization is counterposed to general culture, recalling the debate on the two cultures (literary culture and social culture, Snow) or the three cultures (also including the humanities) and the importance of interdisciplinary culture and research. Positive and negative aspects of the new social media (Blogs, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.) are illustrated, with cautions against the risks of corruption of the social discourse.

By the end of the Second World War, the professional class presided over a massive alignment of national and global institutions with virtue capitalism. This global ‘welfare state’ moment makes it seem that virtue capitalism went hand in hand with state control. However, professionals were often ambivalent about their connection to the state. When Canada first ventured into nationalised healthcare, for example, doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike to avoid it. Despite often rejecting state interference, which many professionals feared might impede the integrity of their work, professionals held a moral relationship between knowing and doing, where they sought to use expertise to effect material change in the world and in individual lives. Such technocratic planning was fundamentally moral, embedding into mid-twentieth century capitalism the internalized, disciplining practices known as governmentality. Professionals were, to use Giorgio Agamben’s framing of the governmental economy, angels of the state. Human capital investment entangled industry, military, and education but, perhaps most importantly, led to an internalized, universal industriousness. The material effects of this ‘angelic’ work were sometimes deeply damaging, building social and economic ‘dependencies’ through the economy that mirrored, in individual lives, the hierarchies constructed by the colonial world.

In the Epilogue, I consider the ways that the rise and fall of the professional class has left the world in thrall to a conflict between managerial capitalism and professional technocracy. Unlike labour versus capital, this intra-bourgeois conflict is not productive of change. Rather, self-perpetuating cycles seeking material and moral authority have infected workplaces and global politics, impeding reform. Much is at stake, including climate change. Professionals, whose work remains necessary to a good society, need to separate virtue from capitalism, disaggregating their moral goals from their own class interests – even to the point of turning the hierarchy that they made on its head. The Epilogue draws inspiration from the reversals of hierarchies made possible by acts of decolonization.

Political science has long claimed that African political systems are dysfunctional because they are too embedded in social and material relations. This assumption informed the rise of the World Bank’s good governance agenda in the late 1980s. This chapter situates this technocratic vision of how to fix African politics in a longer ‘epistocratic’ political tradition that emphasises the knowledge-based, epistemic dimensions of governance. In this context, the Lagos model, developed first in Lagos state, southwest Nigeria, and then extended to nearby Oyo and Ekiti, was celebrated by donors as an example of ‘home grown good governance’, where governance reforms were not imposed by donors through conditionality but actively adopted by the government itself. By tracing how this domesticated version of the good governance agenda was contested in the twenty-first century electoral competition, this book re-evaluates the social, material and epistemic dimensions of good governance. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of good governance in Nigeria. It then considers the methods and methodologies we can use to study competing conceptions of good governance, connecting the empirical study of politics ‘on the ground’ to more theoretical debates in political theory, before summarising the key contributions of the book.

The previous chapter demonstrated how politicians and voters in southwest Nigeria value accessibility as a form of accountability: in order to be accountable, leaders should maintain spaces for direct face-to-face communication with their constituents. This chapter builds on further empirical examples to give a theoretical account of accountability as accessibility and argues that it helps reveal the ontological limits of dominant scholarly approaches to accountability, namely, principal–agent models. It starts by asking what makes communication an intrinsically valuable part of accountability. Theories stressing the power of communication in the public sphere to confer recognition and dignity on citizens are considered and found to capture part of the lived experience of accessibility. However, they neglect the way accessibility draws on social sanctions to constrain rulers in the context of unequal power relations. A review of the historical roots of the principal–agent models in liberal theory explains why dominant theories struggle to accommodate the sanctioning power of communication. More generally, the assumed desirability of an anonymous and impersonal modern state leads to a neglect of the more socially embedded aspects of governance. In contrast, Yoruba political vocabulary fluently expresses the political importance of social sanction via the concept of olá (social honour).

Politics in Nigeria teaches us that power must be socially embedded for it to be accountable. Previous chapters drew on in-depth qualitative fieldwork in southwest Nigeria to theorise alternative conceptions of the constituent parts of the good governance agenda, namely, accountability, transparency, and the public–private divide. If we are to take the social dimension of these “ethnographically derived political concepts” seriously, then we need to rethink the neo-classical economic ontology of the dominant approach to good governance, which relies on principal–agent models. Thus, the book’s empirical analysis gives rise to normative political prescriptions which entail a methodological critique. The second part of the chapter argues that by neglecting the social dimension of governance, technocracy is vulnerable to populist challengers who leverage unmet demands for closeness and connection. Socially embedded governance intersects with three key debates of interest to theorists of democratic politics, concerning scale, inequality and conflict. By rethinking the contours of politics, we discover that the struggles of Nigeria’s fourth republic are not marginal to democratic theory – the struggles of a democracy yet to really get started – rather, they lie at the crux of what it means to wield power responsibly.

This chapter zooms in on the dynamics of decision-making in the EU. Whereas Chapter 4 sketches the structures and procedures used to take decisions in the EU, this chapter discusses the processes that take place within those structures and procedures. It distinguishes between three types of decision (history-making, policy-setting and policy-shaping) that show different decision-making dynamics. In relation to history-making decisions, the chapter provides an introduction to negotiation theory and identifies the various strategies actors use in negotiations. In relation to policy-setting decisions, it discusses the dynamics of interinstitutional decision-making, using Tsebelis’ veto player theory. This is followed by a discussion of the role of different types of policy networks in EU policy-making. The chapter ends with sections on the role of technocracy in the EU (using the better regulation programme as an example) and the debate about flexibility and inertia in EU policy-making (engaging with Scharpf’s joint-decision trap thesis).

This chapter argues for a conception of accountability as accessibility. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with local politicians, market traders and NGO activists in Ibadan, Oyo State, it shows the ubiquity of calls for accessibility in Nigeria and beyond. Politicians are accessible insofar as they maintain spaces for direct contact between themselves and their constituents. At the level of theory, accessibility reveals a blind spot in dominant conceptions of accountability, which rely on principal–agent models, and poses new conceptual questions about the interaction between communication and sanctioning power. Thus, Nigerian political discourse gives us the language to describe a universal but neglected aspect of accountability and hints at a more socially embedded approach to good governance. Political competition in the twenty-first century southwest Nigeria shows how the politics of competing conceptions of accountability play out in practice. The rise and fall of the ‘Lagos model’ in Oyo and Ekiti states can be understood as a struggle over different conceptions of democratic accountability. Where technocratic notions of good governance insulate decision-makers from their constituents and favour abstract data over face-to-face interaction, it leaves open the field for populist politicians to promise accessibility through exaggerated, almost pantomime performances of connection and communication.

Chapter 5, “The Technocratic–Confucian Continuum,” establishes a working definition of the technocratic versus Confucian approaches to governance and completes the basic construction of three model types, termed “imperial technocracy,” “Confucian institutionalism,” and the “technocratic–Confucian continuum.” As applied to Song, I use the term “technocracy” to designate a wide range of functionaries who held positions that required specialized knowledge often acquired through family training or guilds (military servitors, clerks, artisans) or through specialized programs of service (eunuchs, female officials) rather than through the “presented scholar” (jinshi 進士) examination system, and who retained these positions for life. Although different from each other, these groups shared a distinctively non-literati, non-Confucian political culture. “Confucian institutionalism” is governance advocated and practiced by officials who (1) had entered service through the jinshi exam system, (2) were committed to a Confucian belief system, and (3) supported a system of established institutions and regulations that they believed would advance a governance that manifested those beliefs. The basic distinction therefore between technocratic and Confucian governance is between primacy given either to technocratic competence or to the belief system that supposedly undergirded Song institutions. The “technocratic–Confucian continuum” envisions the entirety of Song political culture along a continuum that comprised these two poles.

Chapter 1 describes the motivations of the Islamists, who crafted what became the 1996 Local Councils Law. In the face of protests and riots in the nation’s cities, Islamist lawmakers in the fourth Islamic Majles (1992–1996) turned to political decentralization to address poorly managed urbanization and local governance as a way of easing economic stresses among lower economic classes that had spurred unrest. The chapter explores the 1996 Local Councils Law in detail, including the structure and the responsibilities of elected local government comprising three institutions: the elected Islamic city council (shura-ye eslami shahr), the mayor (shahrdar), and the municipal bureaucracy (shahrdari). The chapter goes on to explain the institutional design and structure of elected local government and its place in the intergovernmental system resulting from the decentralization reforms. It highlights the tension between two parallel vertical systems of hierarchical governance, between the top-down appointed system bureaucratic hierarchy and the bottom-up. The contradiction between the two systems results from the tension between two counterpoised systems of upward and downward accountability.

After the war with Iraq (1980–1988), Iran had to reconstruct the economy and the government’s public management systems to address mounting challenges of urban poverty, low economic growth, and poor local management, which had led to significant urban unrest in several cities. The technocratic response of the Rafsanjani administration (1989–1997) included tentative steps to decentralize some central government functions to municipalities and a mandate for them to become financially self-sufficient. The technocrats supported decentralization for instrumental or pragmatic reasons of increasing the efficiency of local administration, not for empowering local democracy. I interpret the tensions between the competing imperatives of the Iranian decision to decentralize by distinguishing two ways a state can be strong, or between what I call good and bad centralization. In so doing, I draw on the distinction of two types of power introduced by Michael Mann, “infrastructural” power – the power of states to achieve collective purposes – and “despotic” power – the capacity of government to exert power over society and individuals. While both authoritarian and democratic states seek to augment the former, authoritarian states depend on strengthening the latter. By their indifference to the goal of checking despotic power, the technocratic endorsement of decentralization worked against democratization and dovetailed with the velayi goal of augmenting both forms of power together toward the goal of Islamizing society and state. At the same time, the failure to promote local economic development through decentralization must be considered a failure of the technocratic agenda.

Chapter 2 lays out how the planning-induced expansion in the state’s capacities led to the formalization of planning’s relationship with statistics. Changes at both the Planning Commission and the Indian Statistical Institute bear witness to this. It placed a statistician and a statistical institute in a position where they could, in turn, shape Plans. The chapter traces a boomerang’s arc: planning’s influence on statistics led to statistics’ influence on planning. It explains how the Indian Statistical Institute completed the transition from a small scholarly body in the outskirts of Calcutta and on the fringes of mainstream academia in the 1930s, to a nodal agency in Indian economic planning by the mid-1950s. And it describes the way in which Mahalanobis used the close proximity of national statistics and economic planning at this moment to carve a position for himself at the Planning Commission. This culminated in him and the Institute drafting India’s pivotal Second Five Year Plan (1956–61), the economic blueprint for decades thereafter. The very possibility that a statistician could transform into an economic planner reveals the wide latitude granted to experts and expertise in a technocratic state.