Technocratic challenges: between political government and the populism

Abstract

This research examines the challenges of institutional administration in relation to public governance, focusing on its economic, ideological, and technical polarities, and highlighting technocracy as a counterbalance to populism. Within this framework, the study aims to demonstrate drawing from political philosophy and contrasting Weberian types of rationality that technocracy constitutes a model of governance capable of counteracting populism from within the state. This is framed within Daniel Bell’s post-industrial paradigm, whose transformative vision reinforced the participation of experts and scientific knowledge in public decision-making, orienting governmental action toward criteria of rationality and prudence.

Accordingly, the central hypothesis posits the technocratization of power as a consequence of post-industrial evolution and the predominance of goal-oriented rationality, functioning as an internal containment mechanism against populism by reducing its societal impact, regardless of the ideological orientation of the government in office.

Consequently, the study develops a descriptive and parametric statistical model, estimated through a fixed-effects econometric approach, based on the Liberal Democracy Index (V-Dem) (Coppedge et al., 2025) and the Global Populism Database (Hawkins et al., 2019), assessing the impact of the latter in relation to ideological positions and levels of democratic freedom. Additionally, the Government Effectiveness Index from the Worldwide Governance Indicators is incorporated as a second empirical-descriptive component, applied through a comparative analysis of Colombia, Chile, and Argentina during the 1995–2024 period.

In this way, the research contributes to the contemporary debate on the viability of technocratic governance models in free democratic societies and their role in strengthening institutional resilience, political stability, and state efficiency.