The Politics of Form: Populism, Technocracy, and the Political Value of Appearances

In just a few years, the vocabulary we use to describe contemporary politics has become crowded with competing labels. Politicians like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Le Pen, or Milei; entrepreneurs with enormous political clout like Musk or Thiel; ideologues straddling both worlds like Bannon: in each of these cases, we find not one label but several competing ones: populist, post-fascist, post-democratic, oligarchic, and, in the case of Musk and Thiel, also neo-reactionary, techno-fascist or techno-feudal. Such proliferation of labels is not a pedantic detail: it signals a real analytical difficulty. We are no longer sure how to conceptualize many of the political phenomena before us. Each label appears to capture something real yet also risks obscuring other aspects.

We suggest that part of this confusion stems from a difficulty that political theory has long been aware of but struggles to truly address: that of viewing political phenomena through a lens capable of interpreting, in their mutual relationship, both their political content and the way in which this content is expressed, embodied, and staged—that is, its form.

In politics, in effect, form and content—while they should remain analytically distinct (avoiding the poststructuralist tendency to blur them into a single whole)—cannot be analyzed in isolation, one apart from the other. And learning to read them together is key to navigating the current landscape, in which grand ideological narratives have lost their former coherence, in which politics is undergoing transformations that challenge traditional categories, and in which this void is increasingly filled by “aesthetic” factors: the personal traits of leaders, the emotions that political identities evoke, the style with which a political actor presents themselves, and so on. As Anna Kornbluh argues in her recent Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, we live in an age of im-mediacy: a pervasive suspicion of mediation, visible in culture, theory, and politics alike, which favors what appears direct, unfiltered, and unconstructed. Yet the claim to access reality without the mediation of forms is itself a form, and a peculiar one: because it presents itself as the absence of form, it must conceal its own nature as such. It is therefore often even more laden with meaning than forms that declare themselves openly, since it operates without being recognized, and so without being questioned. It is precisely for this reason that form and content need to be analyzed together if we are to grasp the specificity of contemporary politics. Content has become increasingly fragmented and difficult to pin down and can no longer characterize political phenomena on its own. Form, for its part, increasingly shapes political effects, but it is not sufficient either.

The debate over technopopulism offers a clear example of what is lost when political phenomena are compared primarily at the level of content while their forms are being neglected. For some time now, an influential group of scholars, most notably Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti in their book Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics, has argued that populism and technocracy share a common underlying logic despite their apparent opposition. Both reject the mediation of political parties and institutions. Both deny pluralism, assuming that society has a single common good, whether identified by experts or embodied by a leader. And both claim to represent society as a whole, in the name either of the people or of expertise. Hence the conclusion that the two phenomena are not only compatible but are merging into a new dominant logic of democratic politics, “technopopulism.”

As we argue in a recent article, we accept much of the analysis but not the conclusion: the thesis of compatibility works as long as one looks solely at content. It is true that populism and technocracy share an anti-mediation and anti-pluralist core, but it is a mistake to take this shared content as evidence of compatibility. This overlooks what pertains to form: not only political style, so to speak, but also modes of representation, methods of mobilization, and forms of politicization. And it is on this level that the differences become decisive: technocracy seeks to neutralize political conflict through expertise, procedural authority, and an aesthetics of impartiality, whereas populism dramatizes and intensifies conflict through personalized representation, affective mobilization, and an antagonistic political style.

The idea that form and content cannot be neatly separated has a long intellectual history, from classical rhetoric and Hegelian dialectics to critical theory and media studies. Across these traditions, form is understood not as a mere container for content but as something that helps shape its meaning and effects. The argument developed here belongs to this broader line of thought, though it applies it specifically to contemporary politics.

There is one concept that makes this co-constitution of form and content particularly evident: representation. To represent always implies expressing a worldview, defending interests and positions, and, at the same time, a way of doing so. It means defining who the people are, what their interests are, how society is structured, and what its problems are—that is, creating an ideological representation of society. But it is also, at the same time, a matter of giving it form through a certain discursive and rhetorical style, and of embodying, staging, and performing that discourse through a body, a style, and a repertoire of symbolic gestures—that is, of giving it a form. Representation is the hinge because, within it, ideological content and expressive style are necessarily held together. This constitutive role of representation can be demonstrated in the difference between populist and technocratic politicians. For example, Donald Trump does not merely claim to represent “the people”; through rallies, informal speech, gestures, and a deliberately transgressive style, he also performs a particular image of who “the people” are, namely those excluded by the decorum of the establishment. A technocratic figure like Mario Draghi does the reverse: through the language and performance of competence and sober problem-solving, he presents society as a set of technical problems with correct solutions, and citizens as beneficiaries of good administration rather than as a collective political subject.

Let’s return to technopopulism. While populism and technocracy share a common content—the rejection of mediation, the claim to represent the whole—their forms are incongruent. It is this incongruity that renders their articulation unstable.

Consider, again, representation. Technocracy relies on a trustee model: technocrats represent the general interest by virtue of their expertise, not of a mandate sought from those represented. Their legitimacy rests on responsibility toward the good of society as a whole, not on responsiveness to popular demands. Symbolic representation is present, but in a subtle, hidden form: embedded in the technocrats’ claims to expertise, which put forward an image of how society should be structured, derived from scientific models. Populism turns this structure on its head: symbolic representation is central and openly displayed, because the leader must embody the unity of the people; while representation as a mandate is extremely strong, because the populist claims not only to represent the people but to be their sole authentic representative. Populism prioritizes responsiveness and embodiment; technocracy, responsibility and competence; and thus, both presuppose different grammars of representation.

The difference is mirrored at the level of politicization. Populism, in Laclau’s view, operates through a logic of equivalence that constructs an antagonistic front against an Other—the elite, the enemy of the people. For populism, mobilization against an opposing group is an ontologically necessary step. Technocracy proceeds according to the opposite logic, that of difference: it seeks a general, technical solution to problems and tends to defuse social divisions rather than mobilize them. Populism tends to politicize social divisions by constructing an antagonistic front. Technocracy tends to translate them into problems to be solved, and thus to depoliticize them. One requires conflict; the other seeks to avoid it on principle.

And the difference ultimately manifests itself at the level of style proper. Populism tends “to flaunt the low,” to play on the effect of transgressive behavior that breaks with convention and to bank on emotional investment and identification with a charismatic leader. Technocracy, on the other hand, cultivates a “high” style: a rationalist language that models itself on scientific discourse, a detached and impersonal relationship with the public, and an emphasis on stability and competence.

It would be a mistake to treat these differences as merely cosmetic issues (purely strategic or instrumental) rather than political and even normative, simply because they do not automatically translate into differences in platforms or policies. For they are different ways of relating to citizens, representing them, and politicizing social issues. They therefore affect political identities themselves, as well as the symbolic planes and discursive arenas in which these identities are constructed. And they thus have significant political effects. They alter ideological coordinates. Precisely because form and content are intertwined, the pairing of technocratic content with a populist form, or vice versa, generates a structural tension that is bound to intensify in times of crisis.

This is exactly what we observed in the case of the Czech ANO movement and its leader, Andrej Babiš. Founded as a technocratic “business-firm party”—with a slogan “run the state like a firm”—ANO was in power when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and it faced a serious reputational crisis when its handling of the emergency proved to be a failure. Faced with the crisis, it had to make a choice: it abandoned its technocratic stance in favor of a populist one. The shift occurred simultaneously in both content and form. The change in form entailed new content, and this, in turn, necessitated new forms. Babiš, who in the pre-COVID era presented himself in a businessman’s suit, with cosmopolitan symbols of power, began appearing in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, wearing a red Trump-style cap emblazoned with “Strong Czechia,” touring the country in a motorhome and mingling with the people. At the same time, Babiš’s role as a political representative has shifted, moving from a technocratic emphasis on responsibility to a populist emphasis on responsiveness. ANO’s shift during this crisis, therefore, cannot be understood by looking exclusively at its ideological profile or its political platforms: one must examine the leader’s body, style, forms, and models of representation.

We believe that this same type of analysis helps us examine recent developments that are reshaping the contemporary political landscape. One of these is the current crisis of various experiments in left-wing populism and the parallel transformation of right-wing populist movements into regimes in which the authoritarian and oligarchic components are increasingly evident, at the expense of the populist ones. If populism is a “thin” ideology, resting on little more than the antagonism between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite, then its political forms largely do the political work, and help shape how it combines with the thicker ideologies it attaches to. Verticalism, charismatic identification, affective mobilization, and decisionism have been adopted by right-wing and left-wing populists alike, but they fit more easily with hierarchical and authoritarian politics than with the egalitarian and participatory commitments of the left.

As Alexandros Kioupkiolis explains, Podemos is a clear example: it emerged from the horizontal and participatory politics of the Indignados, yet developed a vertical, leader-centered form of representation at odds with its own aspirations. On the right, this conflict doesn’t arise, and populist movements have consolidated by turning openly authoritarian, nationalist, and nativist. The paradox is that a politics invoking the sovereignty of the people can end up concentrating its exercise in a leader who claims to embody their will. On the left, this clashes with ideals of participation and emancipation; on the right, it facilitates the concentration of power, reducing the people to a symbolic source of legitimacy.

Similar considerations apply to reactionary technocrats, such as Musk or Thiel, as exponents of a digital technocracy that blends the cult of expertise with explicit hostility toward democracy. While technocracy, as it developed in contemporary democratic regimes, retained a connection to democracy—neutral expertise in the service of the common good—its most radical current versions, fueled by digital ideology, have now abandoned this view in favor of openly epistemically authoritarian visions, where expertise authorizes governance without consent. The epistemic claim, namely, the idea that expertise confers a special right to govern, may remain recognizable. But its political significance changes when articulated within different forms of authority and representation. It is the form that makes the difference, aided by algorithmic mediation that fragments representation into individual representations that are more easily governed from above, eroding the situated subject that democracy presupposes.

The form/content approach seems particularly useful to us today. Fredric Jameson has shown how narrative, generic, and aesthetic forms carry sedimented historical and social content within them, preserving the memory of the conditions that produced them and continuing to generate ideological effects independently of the intentions of those who use them. We are living in an era in which the great ideological narratives of the twentieth century have gradually unraveled. This is not the end of ideology, as we know. It is rather the weakening of ideology as an architecture of content: the loss of those broad and relatively stable systems of belief within which individual elements found their place and meaning. The process converges with what Peter Mair called “ruling the void”, in which party politics withdraws into itself, and citizens are left as spectators; and with what Anton Jäger has recently redescribed as “hyperpolitics”: maximum intensity of mobilization and political passion, but without the institutional framework that once supported it. In such a situation, political content appears fragmented, contradictory, tactically selected, and quick to shift.

But when the content unravels, the form tends to gain relative weight. It is style, performance, and the symbolic and mobilizing repertoire that act as the glue, producing recognizability and identification, and guiding political action—precisely to the extent that content is no longer able to do so on its own. A leader who changes position on substantive issues but maintains consistency in their communicative style, demeanor, and relationship with the public continues to be recognized and followed: it is form that guarantees the continuity of political identity, where content no longer does so.

Broad ideological frameworks, after all, were not merely programs: they were also interpretive grids that made an otherwise opaque social reality legible. When these grids loosen, reality does not become any less complex, but those who confront it risk being deprived of the tools needed to make sense of it. At that point, form increasingly takes on the interpretive, political work that ideological content can no longer perform. This does not mean, however, that form offers the same understanding as the old frameworks: it may give an illusion of order, a sense of orientation, without providing the conceptual tools to grasp what is unfolding. Content has not become irrelevant, but the balance between the two poles has shifted. Political theory must keep pace with these changes.