What Is Technocracy? Rule by Experts Explained

Technocracy in plain terms

The word combines the Greek techne, skill or craft, with kratos, rule. A technocracy is a system in which power goes to people because of what they know, not because they won an election or inherited a title.

The term is used in three ways, and it helps to keep them apart:

1. A full system of government run by engineers, scientists or economists. This has mostly existed on paper.
2. A technocratic government, meaning a cabinet led or staffed by non-party experts, usually for a limited time.
3. A style of policymaking that treats political questions as technical problems with correct answers that data and expertise can find.

As a political outlook, technocracy holds that policy should be guided mainly by evidence and expert judgment rather than ideology or popular feeling. It does not say what the experts should conclude, which is why it can sit alongside very different economic views.

Where the idea came from

Plato and the philosopher-kings

The deepest root is Plato's Republic. Plato argued that the ideal city would be ruled by philosophers, because only they truly know what is good, and that most citizens should defer to them, as passengers defer to a skilled navigator. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Plato's rulers were also meant to be people who did not want power for its own sake. Critics ever since have asked who would choose the wise, and who would check them.

Saint-Simon and the age of industry

In early nineteenth century France, Henri de Saint-Simon argued that a modern society should be organized by its productive members, its scientists, engineers and industrialists, rather than by aristocrats and clergy. His followers influenced both early socialism and the planners who built railways and banks in France. Later, the sociologist Max Weber described the spread of bureaucracy based on trained expertise as a defining feature of modern states, and worried about the "iron cage" it could create.

Smyth, Scott and the Technocracy movement

The word technocracy itself is credited to William Henry Smyth, a Berkeley engineer, who used it in 1919 for a proposed government guided by a national council of scientists and technical experts.

The idea had its moment in the Great Depression. Howard Scott, a self-described engineer, argued that the price system had broken down and that the economy should be measured and managed in units of energy. He proposed replacing money with energy certificates, given equally to every citizen and expiring after a set period so wealth could not pile up. Working with researchers at Columbia University on a survey of industrial energy use, his group attracted huge attention in late 1932. A widely mocked national radio address from New York's Hotel Pierre in January 1933 hurt its credibility, and the movement faded, although Technocracy Incorporated, the group Scott led, survived for decades.

The US also had an engineer president: Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer known as the Great Engineer, who championed efficiency and expert management, though he was a mainstream Republican rather than a member of the movement.

Technocracy in practice today

Technocratic governments in Europe

Political scientists Duncan McDonnell and Marco Valbruzzi, writing in the European Journal of Political Research in 2014, counted 24 technocrat-led governments in EU democracies between the Second World War and 2013. Fully technocratic governments, in which the prime minister and most ministers are non-party experts, were rare: only six. Several came during financial crises.

The best known examples:

Monti's cabinet was made up entirely of non-party experts. It was appointed to restore market confidence during the eurozone debt crisis and pushed through pension reform and austerity measures. Draghi led a broad national unity coalition that mixed party politicians with experts, focused on pandemic recovery funds.

Independent central banks and agencies

The most widespread form of technocracy is quieter. In most rich democracies, interest rates are set by independent central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, whose leaders are appointed rather than elected. The reasoning is that politicians face pressure to keep money cheap before elections, so taking monetary policy out of their hands produces lower inflation. Regulators for medicines, aviation and nuclear safety work on similar logic. Our guide to what is neoliberalism explains how central bank independence spread from the 1980s onward.

China's engineers and Singapore's planners

Some authoritarian states are often described as technocratic. After Deng Xiaoping's reforms, the Chinese Communist Party promoted leaders with technical training, and engineers dominated its top ranks for years. The sociologist Joel Andreas, in Rise of the Red Engineers (2009), traced how a new class of Communist technocrats, many trained at Tsinghua University, came to rule China. Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew is also often cited for recruiting top students into a highly paid civil service. These cases show that technocracy can coexist with one-party rule, which is a large part of why critics worry about it. Our guide to what is authoritarianism covers that link.

What the public thinks

Rule by experts is more popular than many people expect. In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey of 38 countries, a median of 49% said a system in which experts, not elected officials, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country would be a good way to govern. In several established democracies, including Spain, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Chile, roughly half or more agreed. The same survey found that large majorities still backed representative democracy, which suggests many people want both: elected leaders, plus more expertise.

The debate

The case for technocracy

Supporters argue that modern problems, from pandemics and climate change to monetary policy and financial regulation, are too complex for decisions driven by campaign slogans. Experts can take a long view, while elected politicians think about the next election. Technocratic bodies, they say, have a strong record: independent central banks are widely credited with taming the high inflation of the 1970s. A crisis government of experts can also make unpopular but necessary decisions that parties are afraid to own. Some centrists and radical centrists see evidence-based policy as a way past partisan gridlock.

The case against

Critics argue that technocracy is fundamentally undemocratic. Voters cannot remove an unelected expert, so mistakes are hard to correct and decisions lack legitimacy. Many policy questions, such as how to share the costs of austerity or balance health against freedom in a pandemic, involve values, not just facts, and calling them technical hides a political choice. Experts may also share the outlook and interests of a narrow class. Populists on the left and the right make this case loudly, and some scholars argue that technocratic governments in Europe helped fuel the populist wave that followed. Our guide to what is populism covers that reaction.

A middle view

Most political scientists see the real question as one of balance. Democracies have long delegated some decisions to experts and courts. The argument is over which decisions, under what oversight, and how citizens can still hold the system to account. Our page on centrism vs technocracy compares two outlooks that often overlap, and technocracy vs transhumanism looks at a related faith in science and technology.

Find where you fit

You may lean technocratic if you trust data and expert judgment over popular opinion, and you would rather have competent administrators than charismatic politicians. You may lean the other way if you think every big decision should answer to voters.

The 12 Axes Political Test matches your views against 60 ideologies, including technocracy. The Political Values Test shows how you weigh liberty against authority, and the Political Spectrum Quiz gives a fast read on where you sit. You can also browse economists and world leaders in our figures library, or read what is a centrist and democracy vs republic.