The ‘de-party-politicization’ of Europe’s political elites. How the rise of technocrats and political outsiders transforms representative democracy.

Project Information

DEPART

Grant agreement ID: 945501

DOI

10.3030/945501

Project closed

EC signature date 20 November 2020

Start date 1 March 2021

End date 28 February 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 856,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 856,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - DEPART (The ‘de-party-politicization’ of Europe’s political elites. How the rise of technocrats and political outsiders transforms representative democracy.)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The DEPART project examines how political careers in European democracies have changed since 1945, and how this transformation has affected representation and political accountability. A central starting point is the observation that the role of political parties in the recruitment of government ministers has changed: parties are less important as a career pipeline today, and more senior-level politicians enter office without strong party links (e.g. technocrats, political outsiders).

These developments pose a major challenge to European democracies, since representation and accountability have typically been ensured by political parties and their representatives in parliaments and governments. Yet when these institutions are increasingly made up of politicians with weaker ties to parties (or none at all, e.g. technocratic ministers), how can we still have responsive and accountable democratic politics?

The DEPART project will examine whether and how changing career patterns among political elites affect the policy outcomes that political systems produce and the way voters hold politicians accountable for their actions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The empirical focus of our work so far has been the creation of a large database on the biographies and careers of government ministers in European democracies. This ongoing work involves a number of steps: locating primary sources of biographical information (e.g. in biographical dictionaries, online archives, official sources), transforming this information into standardized text units, and coding these text units according to a newly created coding scheme that can capture almost all aspects of a person’s biography. All these steps require manual work by research assistants and thus constant training and supervision by the project team. We have produced first empirical analyses based on these data

In addition to this massive effort, we have also started to examine how voters respond to the presence of ministers with varying ties to political parties (e.g. technocratic appointees to ministerial office). In a first study, we conducted survey-experimental work in Italy to study how voters attribute responsibility for (good or poor) government performance to ministers and political parties under different hypothetical scenarios. More such work will be conducted in the second half of the DEPART project.

We are also in the process of fielding a large-scale survey of political office-holders to anchor our understanding of what constitutes a ‘party insider’ (a central concept in our work) in real-world perceptions of politicians. This work will be used to inform our own approach to conceptualizing and measuring the party attachment of politicians based on our biographical data collection.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The DEPART data collection on politicians’ biographies will go much beyond any existing data source on political elites. This is possible because of the extremely comprehensive coding system that we have designed. It allows us to capture almost all potential episodes in a person’s biography, whether it is entering a political party, holding a certain job or public office, working for a specific interest group, joining a social movement, fighting in a rebel group, going to prison, publishing a book, or receiving the Nobel prize.

This will enable us to paint a much more detailed and comprehensive picture of the people who govern us than was possible in the past, while at the same time allowing for large-scale statistical analysis of the data.

Over the remainder of the project period, we will be using these data to tackle a number of important research questions: First, we will investigate how the role of political parties in the recruitment of government ministers has changed, and how this affects the representation of specific groups and interests in high political office. While research on representation is a well-established field in political science, our empirical approach will allow us to advance the field by capturing empirical complexity (e.g. changing affiliations to social classes over the life course) that empirical research has eschewed so far. Second, we will examine how the changing biographies of ministers affect policy outcomes, especially in the socio-economic realm. This will allow us to link research on unequal representation with the study of policy outcomes. Finally, we will study the impact of ministerial backgrounds on voting behavior – especially in voters’ attribution of responsibility for government performance to political parties. This work will deepen and advance our understanding of how politicians’ individual-level characteristics affect voting and how this relationship is shaped by political parties.