Beyond Party Government? Technocratic Trends in Society and in the Executive

This book proposes to analyse, in a sample of European countries, the weight of technocracy in governments with the ambition of providing, in the first place, an accurate mapping of the phenomenon and, secondly, to explore some of the potential explanatory factors of its growing presence in Political Leadership. Our study concentrates its attention on Europe for three main reasons: First, this is the region of the world where party government has found its fullest development, but also where the party systems generated by the recent waves of democratization have been considered as substantially weaker. Secondly, Europe is the region where the parliamentary form of government is the most diffuse, but also where, in recent times, semi-presidential forms of governments have proliferated. Thirdly, Europe has seen with the EU, the development of a particularly strong form of multi-level governance. There are thus good reasons for an in-depth exploration of cabinet recruiting patterns in this area of the world.