technocracy

Between Technocracy and Populism

aardvarchaeology | December 7, 2013

I'm confused by this political science paper I'm editing. The guy wants to find a middle way for the EU between two kinds of authoritarianism: technocracy and populism. I understand the first word to mean ”rule by academic experts who don't care what the voters say”, and the second to mean ”rule by uneducated clowns who will do whatever gets them votes”. This doesn't seem to apply to Sweden, where both our elected representatives and the voters typically have middling education, or in a worldwide perspective, an enormously high general level of education. There are hardly any PhDs in Swedish…