Sabbatical Stefan Rummens: Populism and technocracy: Opposite threats to our democratic society?

During this sabbatical period, I explicitly connect two lines of research of my own for the first time: on the one hand my work on Jürgen Habermas and on the other my work on populism. The connecting element is an investigation into the technocratic content of contemporary politics. The leading research hypothesis is that populism and technocracy should be seen as opposing but mutually reinforcing threats to our contemporary democracy.
This hypothesis is further investigated on the basis of three concrete research questions:
1/ What is Technocracy? This research project is based on Habermas's work on technocracy. This work dates from the 1960s and 1970s and analyzes technocracy in the context of the Keynesian welfare state. My research aims to update that analysis by examining how contemporary neoliberal hegemony has changed the nature of technocracy.
2/ Are Populism and Technocracy Opposing Threats to Democracy? In previous research, in line with the work of Claude Lefort, I have shown that populism can be understood as an illegitimate filling of the void of power, which is constitutive of democracy and the ontology of the democratic people. The hypothesis to be explored here is that the (neoliberal) technocracy can be understood in the reverse or 'mirrored' sense as a disappearance of the place of power.
3/ Is there a mutually reinforcing dynamic between technocracy and populism? The hypothesis to be explored here is that the rise of technocracy has affected the social and political ontological conditions for the success of populism and that the success of populism, conversely, strengthens further a number of depoliticising tendencies within governance