Abstract
The creation of technocratic caretaker governments in several European countries in the wake of the Great Recession (2008–2009) and the Eurozone crisis led to renewed academic interest in such administrations. Although such governments are often assumed to be illegitimate and democratically dysfunctional, there has been little empirical consideration of if and how they legitimate themselves to mass publics. This question is particularly acute given that, empirically, caretaker technocrat-led administrations have been clustered in newer, more crisis-prone democracies in Southern and Eastern Europe where high levels of state exploitation by parties suggest a weak basis for any government claiming technocratic impartiality. This article uses Michael Saward’s “representative claims” framework to re-examine the case of one of Europe’s longer-lasting and most popular technocratic administrations, the 2009–2010 Fischer government in the Czech Republic. The article maps representative claims made for Fischer and his government, as well as counterclaims. Claims drew on the electoral mandate of sponsoring parties, the government’s claimed technocratic neutrality, and on Fischer’s “mirroring” of the values and lifestyle of ordinary Czechs (echoing some populist framings of politics). The article argues that the Fischer government benefited from multiple overlapping representative claims, but notes the need for robust methodology to assess the reception claims by their intended constituency. It concludes by considering the implications of actors’ ability to combine populist and technocratic claims, noting similarities in technocratic governments and some types of anti-establishment party.
The establishment in short succession of a series of non-partisan caretaker governments in European democracies such as Greece and Italy in 2010–2012 sparked a new wave of academic interest in short-term technocratic administrations, which seem to be a recurring phenomenon. Different streams in the emerging literature have considered how technocratic or technocrat-led governments can best be defined and typologised, why and how they form, and if and how their occurrence is part of a broader malaise of democracy in Europe. 1 However, although such governments have sometimes been long-lasting and the default assumption often has been that they are (or should be seen) as illegitimate and democratically dysfunctional, there has been little consideration of if and how they legitimate themselves to mass publics. This question is particularly acute given that empirically caretaker technocrat-led administrations have been clustered in newer, more crisis-prone democracies in Southern and Eastern Europe where weaker bureaucratic traditions and high levels of state exploitation by political parties suggest a weak basis for any government claiming technocratic impartiality.
In this article, using Michael Saward’s framework of democratic politics as the making of “representative claims,” I re-examine the case of one of Europe’s longer-lasting and most popular technocratic administrations, the 2009–2010 Fischer government in the Czech Republic to consider how a technocratic government in a newer European democracy can make seemingly successful claims to legitimacy despite unfavourable background conditions. The article is structured as follows. It first notes how discussion of technocratic governments has largely taken place through—and been overshadowed by—the literature on democratic party government. It then presents Saward’s framework of “representative claims” and relates Richard Katz’s ideas about the “legitimising myth” of party government in Western democracies and ideas drawn from the technocracy literature to Saward’s framework. The article next turns to examine the question empirically. It notes the potentially paradoxical position of technocratic governments in newer European democracies and presents the 2009–2010 Fischer government in the Czech Republic as a case typifying the circumstances in which technocratic caretaker governments emerge, but outlying in its popularity and apparent legitimacy. The article then examines the representative claims made for and by the Fischer government during its term in office, which are found to offer a novel and, to some extent, conflicting set of public rationales for its legitimacy. The article reflects on these findings and draws conclusions for future research on technocratic and party governments using claims-making frameworks.
Technocrat Administrations through the Prism of Party Government
Political scientists and democratic theorists have themselves often taken normative stances on if and how technocratic governments erode democracy. 2 However, the question of how they are legitimised to mass publics in empirical settings has remained un(der)studied and, where it is touched on, heavily filtered through debates about party government. Echoing an older set of concerns voiced in 1960s, 3 political scientists initially viewed the emergence of administrations of technocrats in Southern Europe in 2011–2012 with dismay, seeing them as signaling the accelerated erosion of democracy in the crisis conditions produced by the Great Recession and the fiscal pressures of Eurozone membership. Technocratic administrations, they suggested, threatened democracy both directly by substituting unelected officials for elected party politicians and in the longer term by potentially fuelling an anti-party or populist backlash. 4 The (implicit) assumption in such commentaries was that technocratic governments—especially if implementing painful reforms—would be received by mass publics as illegitimate forms of cross-party collusion, that is, as an attempt by parties to deny democratic choice, evade government responsibility, and avoid accountability.
Subsequent assessments, however, noted that despite these high-profile Southern European cases, caretaker technocrat governments in contemporary Europe remained an empirically rare phenomenon, infrequently punctuating long periods of “normal” party government. 5 “Full” technocratic governments without any party politicians were rarer still. Technocratic caretaker administrations were, moreover, invariably appointed within normal constitutional procedures by parties or elected presidents; relied on the support (or least acquiescence) of party-based legislatures to assume office; and worked on the basis of mandates defined and circumscribed by elected politicians. 6 In this perspective, technocratic caretaker governments were seen as an episodic emanation of party-based democracy, which were troubleshooting short-term difficulties in government formation and needed no legitimation beyond that attaching to parties. If there was a problem with technocratic governments (and other forms of delegating to experts), it was likely a side effect of parties’ own declining legitimacy as their social and organisational roots eroded in fragmented post-industrial societies and they struggled to articulate or implement policy alternatives in an increasingly globalised post–Cold War world. 7
Even when themselves the subject of direct empirical study, technocratic governments have been defined largely by what they are not and subsumed into notions of non-partisanship or non-party government. In their widely cited typology, McDonnell and Valbruzzi, for example, argue that technocratic government should be understood as a “reverse mirror image” of Richard Katz’s classic definition of party government, that is, as a context where policy is not set or enacted by parties and political decisions not made by elected party representatives. 8 Similarly, other than being non-partisan, a technocrat-minister has merely be “said to possess recognized non-party political expertise which is directly relevant to the role occupied in government.” 9 While Katz’s seminal essay argued that the ideal type of party government—resting on the idea of a chain of democratic delegation from voter to party, and from party to government—also functioned normatively and more publicly (in a cruder form) as “the dominant legitimising myth of European democracies,” it is unclear what a “reverse mirror image” view of technocratic governments implies about their claims to legitimacy.
Legitimising Claims for Party and Non-party Governments
This is a puzzling omission. Technocrat-led caretaker governments are among the most advanced forms of power sharing between elected politicians and technocrats in contemporary European democracies. 10 There is, moreover, a distinct and well-established body of scholarship on technocrats and technocracy, which examines their origins and nature and deals precisely with the distinct political appeal(s) they make, usually based on notions of neutral expertise or specialist knowledge. 11 However, its reference points are diverse, taking in a range of historical, regional, and institutional settings.
Such diverging claims to legitimacy may be usefully approached through the “representative claim” framework of Michael Saward, which is flexible enough to accommodate the claims of elected and unelected actors across a range of (non-)institutional and cultural contexts, and whose “dynamic” view of representation makes it well suited to study politically unconventional episodes such as technocratic governments. As several scholars have noted, it is also pertinent to more enduring phenomena such as parties or populist movements. 12
Saward sees actors in democratic politics as making ongoing, shifting sets of competing (and overlapping) “representative claims” to legitimately exercise power on behalf of others. Representation is thus “a dynamic quality of political life spread unevenly across societies, taking in a range of ‘public’ and ‘private’ actors and organizations,” rather than (just) a fixed institutional relationship. 13 A representative claim, he explains, is “an act whereby a maker of representations (‘M’) puts forward a subject (‘S’) which stands for an object (‘O’) that is related to a referent (‘R’) and is offered to an audience (‘A’).” 14 The “object” is the constituency depicted in representative claim, the “referent” the real-life individuals the claim refers to, and the “audience” those who may recognise and accept the claim and hence be represented. Democratic legitimacy for Saward is thus perceived legitimacy, the acceptance of a representative claim by an appropriate constituency in an open society in which citizens can freely weigh competing claims. 15 What Katz terms the legitimising “myth of party government” can be viewed as a set of elective (electorally based) representative claims staked for parties (subject) as representing certain people (referent) based on depictions of them as a particular electoral or social constituency (object) based on the notion of voters delegating authority to accountable representatives (organised into parties) in line with the result of competitive elections. 16 The precise form of elective claims made for parties—and the nature of the constituencies they invoke—varies by individual party and national or historical context 17 and, as Katz notes, may also bear little resemblance to more complex empirical realities of liberal-democratic polities. 18 If long-established and well-embedded, parties may additionally benefit from what Saward terms “sedimented representative claims,” that is, the “broad legitimacy of political institutions and distribution of political authority [which] in a sense makes the claims for them.” 19
However, Saward sees (democratic) “representation” in more expansive terms than simply electoral mandates. He argues that there are a range of non-elective “representative claims” that are potentially legitimate and democratic. This implies, firstly, that parties and elected politicians can (and do) boost their legitimacy with additional non-elective claims (e.g., regarding their local or historical roots). 20 However, it also implies that there are a wide range of unelected actors who may be able to make legitimate “representative claims,” filling in gaps that elective representation cannot fill. They may, for example, claim to be representative because they share characteristics or experiences with those represented (descriptive representation or “mirroring”); represent higher or enduring interests rooted in culture, morality, or tradition that parties (by definition partial and partisan) may struggle to articulate. They may also stake claims based on mass mobilisation or mass membership, on notions of “stakeholding,” or on the moral imperative of speaking up for unheard or unvoiced interests. Finally, they may “represent” constituencies aesthetically or performatively simply by offering portrayals and depictions of themselves that ring true to their intended audience. 21
Although highly varied, unelected actors’ claims, Saward argues, are likely to be credible to audiences if they fit two broad (and somewhat opposed) criteria: (1) if they show their subjects as embedded in a legitimate constitutional or institutional context, for example, as part of the chain of democratic delegation, or as enjoying sufficient “connectedness” with it to bathe in the “reflected glow of electoral process” or (2) if the claim made allows the claimant to be viewed as independent “unbeholden to other interests, genuine in their convictions, and owing nothing troubling in terms of money or backing to others—[carrying] an air of ‘untaintedness.’” 22 In a contemporary European context, technocratic caretaker governments’ claims appear likely to be split and positioned midway. As the product of a legal or constitutional process, they can claim embeddedness in a wider democratic order, stressing that their interim status makes them merely short-term departure from the norm, and—as they are usually appointed or supported by elected politicians—they can claim to be the final link in the chain of democratic delegation.
Conversely, they may also be able to make representative claims based on independence and disinterestedness. Although divided over a range of issues, the technocracy literature agrees that technocrats’ claim to rule rests on a proclaimed ability to provide a superior quality of governance by better identifying and providing for the public interest through the use of rational or scientific knowledge. Technocrats historically also have backgrounds or outlooks that insulates them from competing sectional or partisan interests, allowing them to act rationally in the public interest. 23 In Saward’s terms, we may thus anticipate claims asserting that governing technocrats (subject) represent all citizens (referent) by acting for the public, the nation, or the society as a whole (object), protecting “the enduring or persisting interests of the state against incursion or corruption by the politics of the moment.” 24
The Paradox of Technocratic Government in Newer Democracies
We now turn to examine representative claims-making by technocratic caretaker governments in concrete empirical context. Technocratic caretaker governments in contemporary Europe have overwhelmingly emerged in newer democracies in the South and East of the continent. 25 Indeed, perhaps additionally reflecting the role of national institutional provisions such as restrictive conditions for early dissolution of parliament, 26 the bulk of such technocratic non-party governments have occurred in only seven countries, all of which experienced repeat episodes of technocratic caretaker government: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Italy, Finland, Greece, Portugal, and Romania. Of these, five can be unambiguously classed as newer “Third Wave” democracies. Together they account for eighteen of the twenty-four cases listed in McDonnell and Valbruzzi’s data set. If later cases are added (to end 2016), this becomes twenty-two of twenty-nine. 27
Such clustering is in itself unsurprising. Newer Southern and Eastern European democracies are poorer and more peripheral in the wider European economy—and hence more vulnerable to economic shocks—and have less well established, but often more clientelistic, and corrupt party systems. Moreover, parties in post-communist Eastern Europe have from the outset been “hollow” state-centred formations with weak social roots, low memberships, and limited institutionalisation, 28 which, to use Saward’s term, may not have the taken-for-granted quality of “sedimented representation” that long established parties in older democracies enjoy. Survey evidence confirms that newer European democracies exhibit greater levels of public distrust in (electorally based) representative institutions and greater public receptiveness to the idea of technocratic governance as an alternative than West European states. 29
This pattern, however, raises a sharp paradox, namely, that the demand for technocratic government is highest in precisely those European democracies that are least well equipped to supply it. The state apparatus and public administration in Southern and Eastern European democracies have proved to be subject to markedly more politicisation and exploitation by parties than those of core West European states—reflecting the historical sequencing of mass democratisation before the formation of a professionalised state administration and the legacies of authoritarian rule. 30 This suggests a relative absence of technocrats and officials who can credibly assume the role of non-partisan governors because of the blurred boundary between party politicians and non-partisan technocrats. Technocratic administrations in newer European democracies may thus struggle for legitimacy and may be as crisis-ridden as the party governments they replace. Indeed, such scenarios have already played out in stark terms in Eastern Europe: The ostensibly technocratic administration of Plamen Oresharski in Bulgaria in 2013, for example, saw an intensification of the instability and mass protests that had brought down the preceding party-based administration and the Oresharski government was itself eventually forced from office in a similar way. 31
The Case of the Fischer Government
However, this has been far from always the case. Some technocratic caretaker administrations in Europe’s newer democracies have had high and enduring levels of popularity. The technocratic government of Jan Fischer in the Czech Republic (April 2009–July 2010) offers a strong case in point. It was, after the Monti government in Italy, the longest serving caretaker technocrat administration in Europe since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, 32 as well as one of small minority of such administrations that, to use McDonnell and Valbruzzi’s term, can be classed as a “full technocratic government,” that is, as a government composed entirely of non-party technocrat ministers with a remit extending beyond short-term “minding the shop.” 33 The Fischer government also enjoyed exceptionally high levels of popularity. Despite implementing an austerity budget, Fischer and his administration enjoyed far higher levels of approval and trust than Czechia’s two other technocrat-led governments: the short-lived administration of Josef Tošovský (January– July 1998) and the longer-lived government of Jiří Rusnok (2013–2014) which was appointed without the prior agreement of any of the country’s parliamentary parties. 34 Indeed, Fischer’s approval ratings make him by some margin the most popular prime minister in the history of the independent Czech Republic and, judged on peak levels of public trust and satisfaction, his administration its most popular government. 35 The Fischer government’s approval ratings were also higher and more buoyant than those of similarly long-lasting “fully technocratic” European governments such as the (2011–2013) Monti government in Italy, which declined after an initial honeymoon period, or the (2015–2016) Cioloș administration in Romania, whose approval ratings fluctuated, but peaked at 46 per cent. 36
The Czech Republic as a Typifying Case
In other respects, however, the Czech Republic exhibits features common to other newer European democracies that have experienced multiple episodes of technocratic government. Party government was stable and well established, but anchored in an exploitative relationship with the state. Since its consolidation in 1992–1996, the Czech party system had seen the continual parliamentary presence of two large parties, the centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and the Czech Social Democrats (ČSSD), and two minor parties, the Christian Democratic Union–Czechoslovak People’s Party (KDU-ČSL) and the Communists (KSČM). Parties had a constitutionally privileged role and had quickly established themselves as dominant actors, fully controlling the legislative process and exercising an effective “power monopoly” despite generally low memberships and poor levels of social implantation: 37 Party governments featured few independent ministers—Seki and Williams’s data suggest only 13.4 per cent between 1992 and 2009. 38 Parties—or individual party politicians—also exercised powerful patronage over the appointment of top-level officials in key state institutions and agencies, exploiting the lack of well delineated career structures and norms in the civil service to operate a system of so-called trafika: the use of high-level partisan appointments to managerial posts in ministries, public bodies, and state-owned companies to reward supporters and enhance their own political control of the state apparatus. 39 As in other European democracies with recurrent technocratic caretaker administrations, restrictive conditions for early dissolution of parliament narrowed politicians’ options following government collapse. In the Czech case, the Constitution set high barriers to early dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies (lower house), which was allowed only in narrowly defined sets of circumstances and could not be initiated by a defeated government. 40
The immediate origins of the Fischer administration lay in the finely balanced political situation between the left and right following the 2006 election—a (then) recurring feature of the Czech party system that made the formation of ideologically coherent majority coalitions difficult 41 —and in the tensions between the left and right over austerity as the Great Recession took hold in 2008–2009. On 24 March 2009, the liberal centre-right minority Civic Democrat–Christian Democrat–Green coalition of prime minister Miroslav Topolánek, which had taken office in January 2007 after months of post-election manoeuvring, narrowly lost a vote of no confidence. Topolánek’s government from the outset had been hampered by its lack of a reliable parliamentary majority and faced repeated motions of no confidence, finally losing office when four former coalition deputies joined opposition deputies in voting against the government.
This implied an interim period during which parties would need to agree either to stage one of the dissolution scenarios envisaged by the Constitution or to pass new constitutional legislation enabling dissolution. Accordingly, the leaders of the two largest parties, outgoing ODS prime minister Topolánek and opposition Social Democrat leader Jiří Paroubek, quickly agreed on a caretaker government of non-political figures for a short period while the Czech EU presidency was concluded (on 30 June 2009) and parties passed a one-off constitutional law shortening the parliamentary term—a template previously used to engineer early elections in 1998, when a caretaker government headed by Josef Tošovský, the governor of the central bank, had held office for six and a half months following the fall of a previous centre-right government. On 5 April 2009, leaders of the three parties of the outgoing coalition and the opposition Social Democrats signed an agreement to this effect, identifying Jan Fischer, the head of the Czech Statistical Office, as the prime minister designate of a temporary government of “non-party experts.” 42 Fischer’s government was appointed in full on 8 May 2009, winning a vote of confidence on 9 June.
The constitutionally problematic status of early dissolution gave Fischer’s caretaker government gained further impetus, when the Czech Constitutional Court ruled that the ad hoc constitutional law passed to call early parliamentary elections was unconstitutional, scrapping early elections planned for October 2009. 43 Although parties quickly passed a new, general constitutional amendment creating an additional route to early dissolution by parliamentary vote, Social Democrat fears that a further constitutional challenge might lead to annulment of the result of early elections led them unexpectedly to decide that they no longer supported early dissolution. As this left the required three-fifths majority in the Chamber unattainable, the Fischer government served an additional five months until the scheduled parliamentary elections of 28–29 May 2010, claiming an extended mandate to pass the state budget and make cuts to meet deficit targets, 44 and finally leaving office on 10 July 2010.
The Paradox of Technocratic Government in the Czech Republic
The formation of the Fischer government vividly illustrates the difficulties of forming a credible technocratic administration in a newer, post-communist democracy. The two main party leaders’ choice of Jan Fischer as caretaker prime minister came as a surprise. Unlike the governor of the central bank Josef Tošovský who had headed the previous (1998) technocratic government, Fischer had no public profile and little experience of high-level politics. In Fischer, Topolánek and Paroubek did, however, appear to have found a figure who embodied the ideal of the technocratic official. A career statistician who had worked his way up to head the Statistical Office, Fischer had never been involved in party politics after 1989, although like many specialists of his generation he had joined the Communist Party during the 1980s to smooth his career path. His views as he clarified and developed them in office evinced a clear technocratic bias, seeing government as essentially a managerial task with his ideal, drawing on his career in the Statistical Office, being that of the career official. The discovery in the head of the Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ) of a prototypical technocrat, was however, not entirely fortuitous. The ČSÚ was one of a number of specialised agencies that functioned relatively freely from political interference—seemingly a legacy carried over the late communist period when it appears to have been one of a number of technical agencies that functioned as islands of bureaucratic autonomy in the communist party-state. 45
However, while Fischer fitted the ideal of the non-party technocrat well, the remaining seventeen non-party ministers in his government presented a more complex picture, exemplifying the difficulties faced by newer democracies seeking credible non-partisan ministers. On first examination, like Fischer himself, all conformed closely with the profile of non-party technocrat. All, like Fischer himself, were not members of a political party when they took office and most had public sector administrative experience. Of the twenty-one individuals who served in the government at the ministerial level, seven were existing “deputy ministers” (náměstky) in the ministries they headed and one a former deputy minister in another ministry, 46 three (including Fischer) were chief executives of state agencies, four were heads of state-owned companies or organisations (the Czech Philharmonic, a large hospital, the Czech national electricity grid [ČEPS], and the Czech national tourism agency), two were diplomats or ambassadors, and one was a mid-ranking official in the European Commission. Only three might loosely be described as coming from civil society backgrounds. 47
However, closer examination of the government’s composition and its ministers’ career trajectories and relationships with parties suggests a more complex construction. While some ministers also had no previous history of partisan engagement, this was somewhat far from the case for all. Approximately one-third of the twenty-one ministers who served in Fischer’s cabinet had been members of or had close and active associations with the party that nominated them. 48 Those who were party members simply resigned their membership on joining the government to meet the formal criterion of non-partisanship and resumed membership after leaving the government.
Several had also stood for national elected office for their nominating parties—a fact that should disqualify them as technocrats in typologies such as that of McDonnell and Valbruzzi—and, although none were front-line politicians, many had pursued on–off political careers. Some ministers with this profile were, moreover, among the most senior members of the government: Foreign minister Jan Kohout, for example, was a long-standing member of the Social Democrats (ČSSD) before taking office who later re-joined the party and stood (unsuccessfully) as a ČSSD candidate for the Senate in 2010, while interior Minister Martin Pecina had been a member of ČSSD for four years before taking up his post as head of the Czech Competition Authority in 2005—he was later briefly an MP for the party. In shaping (and making nominations to) the Fischer government, Czech parties adapted the trafika system and the networks of officials with political affiliations in the top echelons of public administration it gave rise to.
Representative Claims and Counterclaims
Contesting the Claims of the Fischer Government
At the outset, it was far from obvious that Fischer’s would be an administration breaking records for popularity. The doubtful non-partisan credentials of many of Fischer’s ministers were quickly picked up on. Critics—making what were, in effect “unrepresentative claims” questioning the legitimacy of the incoming government—called into question whether, in fact, its ministers had high-level specialist expertise and/or the detachment from sectional or partisan interests needed to govern well or to represent the enduring or underlying interests of the state.
The inexperience of Fischer and the “semi-political” background of his key ministers were subject to withering criticism by the media and politicians not party to the agreement, including some internal critics of Topolánek in the Civic Democratic Party. The editorial of the news magazine Respekt, for example, saw Fischer as “a likable, competent official” whose obscurity would leave him struggling to manage the Czech EU Presidency, 49 while a columnist for the tabloid Blesk dismissed him as an “obliging honest Mr Nobody” whose personality was as dull as his “second-rate 1970s suit.” 50 Fischer’s membership of the Communist Party in 1980s was also attacked by some commentators who saw it as typical of a morally compromised generation of state officials formed in the late communist era, cancelling out whatever other claims to non-partisanship might be made for them. 51
While not questioning the technocratic caretaker government’s legality or constitutionality, other critics rejected any notion of the “disinterestedness” of the Fischer government by highlighting its embeddedness and connectedness with the existing party-political establishment. Here “connectedness” with established constitutional order was not a source of legitimacy as Saward’s discussion of non-elective representative claims proposes, but of illegitimacy because of established parties’ supposed capture by corrupt vested interests. These critics suggested that Fischer’s government was so dominated by the two largest parties that it was no more than a “hidden Grand Coalition,” 52 an accusation previously levelled at the highly unpopular “Opposition Agreement” confidence-and-supply deal between the (then governing) Social Democrats and the (opposition) Civic Democrats in 1998–2002. 53 Other commentators conceded that Fischer’s government might have a degree of independence from parties, but argued that his administration would be captured by the same informal interest groups that had previously penetrated parties and party-based governments. 54 Given the overlap between politics, business, and public administration at the heart of the trafika system, several ministers had professional or career ties to economic interest groups, as well as parties. There were suggestions throughout Fischer’s term of office that potentially corrupt informal relationships between government and business were continuing as under previous party governments, especially in the field of energy policy. 55 How despite such evident vulnerabilities did Fischer’s administration win such high levels of support and acceptance? Fischer himself proved an unexpectedly competent head of government, both domestically and on the international stage, 56 and his administration successfully steered several contentious items of legislation through parliament, most notably (despite unwanted amendments) the December 2009 budget. It is also true that the Czech economy was less severely impacted by the Great Recession than those of Southern and South-eastern European states, and levels of unemployment and public debt were notably lower. 57 However, the record approval ratings of Fischer and his government achieved at a time of deep recession suggest that a more complex process of legitimation was at work, rather than simply public approval for a display of unexpected political competence.
Applying the Representative Claim Framework
In a Czech context, the public appeal of alternatives to party government, including technocratic governance, has often been analysed by recourse to simple notions of political culture or national exceptionalism: that for political-cultural reasons Czech society is unusually receptive to anti-political alternatives to party government. 58 Tucker et al., for example, relate the earlier technocrat-led caretaker administration of Josef Tošovský in 1998 (backed by president Václav Havel) to a Czech tradition of “non-political politics” sceptical of conventional party politics, which can be traced back through the philosophy of dissident intellectuals of the 1980s to President Masaryk in the interwar period and, ultimately, to the preeminent role of culture in nineteenth-century nation building. 59 However, survey-based research undermines the notion that Czech public attitudes to parties or technocratic alternatives are strongly marked by political–cultural exceptionalism. 60 Moreover, both historically and in contemporary Czech politics, there have been episodes where anti-party projects, or technocratic projects, have met with weak public approval, and discourses endorsing parties and democratic party government have been in the ascendant. The institutional and constitutional embedding of party government in the Czech Republic from mid-1990s, for example, was accompanied by a set of widely diffused normative ideas favouring “standard” party-based representation, challenging the views of ex-dissident politicians who advocated a model of non-ideological civic consensus and loose, participatory movement-parties. 61
The representative claims approach offers a framework better able to capture both the dynamic and conflictual nature of politics and the cultural and historical context that may inform it. As Saward explains, “claim-making and claim-reception are deeply culturally inflected practices” framed within a “cultural code” or “cultural moment,” which sets bounds on the range of claims accepted as legitimate, but at the same time provides ready-made tropes that can be reinterpreted and re-presented in new ways. 62 In the Czech post-1989 context, claims were typically framed in terms of perceived cultural affinity with the West and the notion of strong pre-communist Czech national democratic tradition, expressed above all in the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938), which was frequently (if often inaccurately) referenced in debates related to constitutional issues or democratic institutions. 63 Politicians advocating “standard” parties thus argued that they were more democratically representative in offering voters clearer choices and lines of accountability—but were also a tried-and-tested West European norm culturally appropriate for Czechs, which reconnected with the democratic tradition of interwar Czechoslovakia. 64 The notion of an anti-party or anti-political culture may perhaps be better as reconceptualised in terms of the (greater) “cultural availability of resources for claims” for or against party government. 65
Representative Claims for the Fischer Government
Turning to apply the claims-making framework directly to the Fischer government, we find that we can identify three overlapping representative claims that emerge in politicians’ statements and media commentary. These (re-)emerge at key points in the life of the government: in the war of words that blew up in April–May 2009 about how the incoming administration should be labelled; after its term and mandate were extended following the Constitutional Court ruling of September 2009; and towards the end of its term when politicians and commentators weighed up its record. Two of these are in line with the earlier discussion mapping party government and technocracy literature onto Saward’s framework of elective and non-elective claims; the third is more surprising.
As might be anticipated, the parties founding Fischer’s government acted as makers of a representative claim, stressing its temporary character and limited role in bridging a short hiatus in normal (elected) party government. The inter-party agreement signed on 5 April 2009 thus spoke of an “interim government” (překlenovácí vláda) of non-party experts that would lead the country to early elections, while outgoing prime minister Topolánek labelled it a “summertime government.” 66 Politicians from parties that had created Fischer’s government stressed that it was legitimate as a product of normal democratic mechanisms: It was based on parties that had an electoral mandate and had formed using normal constitutional procedures, winning an unprecedented level of parliamentary support in the vote of confidence. 67 The veteran Social Democrat politician Zdeněk Jičínský even went so far as to argue that the Fischer government was “an expression of the constitutional principle that the political system is based on the functioning of political parties.” The thinly veiled party affiliations of Fischer’s ministers were, in his view, a positive for the future development of party government, showing how ministers with different party backgrounds could govern calmly and co-operatively. 68 Jičínský’s claim was, however, a relatively isolated one, indicating the limits of the elective claims that could be made for Fischer’s government, as direct co-operation of big parties in government was widely understood as cartel-like—and hence illegitimate—negation of voter–party relationship.
Politicians also largely avoided the historically derived term “government of officials” (úřednická vláda) used to describe technocratic governments in interwar Czechoslovakia that had (re-)entered common usage in both Czech media commentary and academic writing after 1998. Although it might have helped to present technocratic administration—and the cross-party co-operation that underlay it—as part of an extended national tradition of party democracy, interwar governments of this type had governed without a parliamentary vote of confidence (not required under the 1920 constitution). The analogy was not an attractive one for the parties whose key representative claim was that Fischer’s caretaker government, although non-party in composition, was rooted in a parliamentary—and hence an electoral—majority.
The representative claims Fischer himself made for his government were more technocratic in emphasis, and he approached his appointment with the view that “the job of prime minister is basically managerial.”
69
Although he was careful to note that his government was circumscribed and legitimised by its origins in an agreement between elected parties, he also stressed his government’s non-party and technocratic character allowed it to take some decisions independently of its supporting parties and the indirect electoral legitimacy they conferred. The government’s programmatic declaration of June 2009 presented by Fischer to the Chamber of Deputies emphasized not only that the government was “high-quality, non-partisan (nestranná) and politically neutral administration” but also that
unlike standard political governments, it has been not formed by a coalition of political parties. It is formed of non-party experts and does not rest on a politically clearly defined, coalition majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
70
The statement glossed over the fact that while not dependent on a “clearly defined, coalition majority” (my emphasis), his government was the product of an explicit written agreement between parties.
Fischer added in the same statement that his government “was not only non-partisan but adheres to the idea of being—in the good sense of the word—a technocratic government.” 71 He did not elaborate on how technocracy was to be understood. However, a distinct, if weakly stated, set of technocratic representative claims can be identified. These mostly focused on the technocratic government’s ability to act in the deeper interests of society and its disinterestedness, rather than the expert status of its members. Its Programmatic Declaration presented to parliament when seeking an initial vote confidence thus stressed it would be able to make “responsible” and “realistic” decisions and to identify areas of well-established permanent national interest (e.g., in foreign policy). The declaration also stressed the government’s ability to represent the whole of society by acting as a focal point and creator of social consensus by being a “uniting rather than a dividing factor in Czech society” in a time of austerity, as well as by consulting more clearly and continuously with other representative bodies such as the parties, president, and interest groups than conventional party politicians could. 72 Here, Fischer’s technocrat-led administration was portrayed as not merely playing a bridging role between conventional party governments but as representing the whole of society offering, albeit in limited areas, a distinct (and better) quality of governance.
The non-elective technocratic claims made for Fischer’s self-styled technocratic administration were, thus, relatively modest, stressing technocrats’ disinterestedness from partisan politics, rather than claiming specialised governmental or administrative expertise of the type stressed in the technocracy literature. Fischer later presented stronger, more sharply anti-party technocratic claims after leaving office. In a memoir reflecting on his time as prime minister (presenting himself to the Czech public as a future presidential candidate), he made clear that he saw party politicians as poorly qualified to govern because they lived in an enclosed world and lacked relevant professional or life experience. In one particularly revealing passage, recalling a conversation during his premiership with an unnamed business leader, he reflected on the possibility that a technocratic government might not be bound by a short-term interim role but might be considered a more “normal” state of affairs as party governments were ineffective at delivering sustained or coherent reforms. 73
Fischer as Mirroring “Ordinary Czechs”
The third and most surprising set of representative claims focused not on the technocratic status of Fischer and his ministers, but on how Fischer’s background outside the political class made him a culturally different type of (non-)politician. The makers of this claim appear to have been media commentators whose representation of Fischer changed in late 2009, as they sought to explain (but may also have fed) his popularity. Having been initially lambasted in the media as lacking leadership qualities and experience, Fischer was now depicted as a modest figure close in lifestyle and values to ordinary people who had triumphed as an anti-politician against the odds. Commentators now contrasted Fischer’s unflamboyant manner and dress favourably with those of overbearing party politicians. Weighing up Fischer’s premiership, the principal commentator of the biggest-selling Czech newspaper MFDnes praised his “feeling and talent for politics,” concluding that he had “shown that high office can be exercised competently, inventively, and unassumingly (nepapalášsky) with a human touch and a sense of humour.” 74
Although Fischer was a well-connected member of the Czech administrative elite, whose life experience—which included regular access to cabinet meetings—diverged sharply from that of the vast majority of Czechs, journalistic profiles gave considerable space to stressing how the stereotypical ordinariness of the prime minister mirrored that of ordinary people. One journalist, for example, characterised his lifestyle as
in no way different from the life of the average Czech. . . . Each morning he leaves his panel-built flat to walk the dog and, when his schedule permits, relaxes by going on weekend walks in the Krkonoš mountains. . . . For years he and his family have regularly gone for lunch . . . in an ordinary restaurant in a small Central Bohemian town near his small weekend home.
Although journalists were initially the makers of this claim, it was one that Fischer himself began to make, pointing out to interviewers his personal discomfort at using an official motorcade and sympathy for ordinary people inconvenienced by it, or relating how he had taken a phone call from the White House in pyjamas in the surroundings of his modest panel-built flat. 75
The implicit representative claim in such portrayals depended not on a relationship to elected parties or the expertise conferred by membership of a disinterested administrative elite, but on what Saward terms a “mirroring claim”: the descriptive similarity between the claimant and the constituency he claims to speak for.” 76 In this construction, caretaker prime minister Fischer (subject) could claim to act legitimately act for ordinary Czechs (object) because he shared and empathised with their tastes, lifestyle, and values in ways that conventional party politicians (supposedly) did not. This portrayal of Fischer as an anti-political everyman—which ignored Fischer’s formal institutional role, experience, or expertise—echoes the classic populist construction of politics, both in sharply opposing the People to a self-regarding elite of professional politicians and in presenting the authority of the leader as resting on authenticity, ordinariness, and proximity to the People. 77
This is at first sight surprising. Populism and technocracy are widely seen as contradictory, albeit in a sense as “opposite sides of the same coin.” As recent work in democratic theory highlights, populist and technocratic claims shared an underlying critique of party-based democracy as distorting the realisation of the public interest and both advocate an unmediated form of politics in which a trusted elite “discovers” this public interest—either through close identification with the people or specialist expertise. There are, however, also significant differences. While populists see parties as unresponsive cabals serving vested or minority interests, technocratic critiques see parties as too focused on meeting voter demands and winning elections, resulting in ineffective policy-making and short-termism. 78
However, viewed in terms of the representative claim-making framework, the juxtaposition of populist and technocratic claims is less surprising. Representative claims are conceived not as ideological or programmatic statements but as a dynamic series of transient events, in which claims are made with varying degrees of strength or weakness; by different (sometimes competing) actors; and may be heard by different audiences. It is thus possible for a subject to accumulate and combine multiple representative claims. Indeed, what appears to have distinguished the Fischer government most was its capacity to quickly take on a mix of elective and non-elective representative claims. The legitimacy of (different) representative claims cannot, however, be fully assessed without considering the final stage in the process: their reception by audiences, both intended and unintended, and the “acts of acceptance” that signal their acceptance of legitimate. 79 This would require fine-grain qualitative data and the development of more systematic empirical methodologies for representative claims analysis extending to claims reception, 80 taking into account the underlying methodological difficulties measuring legitimacy. 81
Conclusions
Since the onset of the Great Recession, technocratic caretaker governments have been a recurrent feature of several European democracies, sometimes governing for extended periods. However, despite varying levels of public support—which in the case of the Fischer administration were sustained and unusually high—the question of how they are legitimated to mass publics has remained largely unexamined. This is a surprising omission given that technocratic caretaker administrations in post-1945 European democracies have occurred in newer crisis-prone democracies in Eastern and Southern Europe, where the existence of credible non-partisan technocrats cannot be taken for granted. These paradoxes are well illustrated by the case of the Fischer administration in Czechia, whose supposedly “full technocratic” cabinet of non-party ministers concealed a complex raft of party-political affiliations and careers straddling public administration and partisan politics.
This article has argued that the “representative claims” framework developed by Michael Saward can usefully be applied to study the legitimation of technocratic governments, both because of its flexibility and as a corrective to the trend in the literature to view technocratic governance solely through the prism of party government. Saward’s framework currently lends itself more to the empirical study of claims making, rather than the reception of claims, and needs theoretically to be extended beyond-positive representative claims to include critical claims intended to de-legitimise, which were an important aspect of the politics of the Fischer government. Despite these limitations, when applied to the case of the Fischer government, the representative claims framework highlights several important issues: (1) that technocratic governments, even where they occurred previously, are subject to extensive representative claims-making and counterclaims making, triggering or reigniting wider debates about democratic representation (including party government); (2) that such construction of representative claims bridges the gap between the ideal of impartial, non-partisan officialdom and the complex reality of party–state relations in newer democracies; (3) and that while using the technocratic label, technocratic governments can, in fact, benefit from a
The mix of representative claims identified around the Fischer administration should also warn us against slipping into a received understanding of technocratic governments as a stopgap device for established parties, likely to provoke an opposite reaction in the form of surging populist, anti-establishment parties. The Czech case suggests that if technocratic governments such as Fischer’s are followed by a rise of anti-establishment parties, it may be because they were similar to—and prefigure—such parties rather than being their polar opposite. A similar mix of claims— an electoral mandate, technocratic policies and “mirroring” claims of a down-to-earth leader, coupled with negative claim to be wholly unlike traditional political party—underlies the “managerial populism” of Andrej Babiš’s highly successful ANO movement, which broke into the Czech parliament in 2013. 82 Elsewhere, the appeal of disruptive newcomers as diverse as Rafael Correa in Ecuador or Emmanuel Macron in France has been interpreted as a similar blend of technocratic and populist claims. 83
Finally we should note that Fischer and other more popular ex-caretaker technocratic premiers such as Italy’s Mario Monti and Romania’s Cioloș, all of whom concluded that their brand of government should continue, bolstered by a direct electoral mandate. Fischer (unsuccessfully) ran for the Czech presidency in 2013, while Monti and Cioloș followed the template of a party-backed government of independent technocrats more closely, by running with electoral blocs of reformist parties and promising some form of post-election continuation of their (as they believed, successful) technocratic administrations. Saward’s framework, which views representation as multi-faceted, fluid, and changeable and asks us “to make democracy strange again,” 84 perhaps invites us to consider whether a democracy of teams of governing technocrats backed by parties might become a more prevalent form of democratic representation.
In this sense, technocratic governments like that of Fischer may be less interlopers to the democratic process than interesting newcomers, whose arrival signals not simply that there are crises to be managed but also opportunities to reconfigure democratic representation.