Technocracy

In the wiki, technocracy is named as one of two failure modes that democracy degrades into when its preconditions are absent. The Educated Electorate page defines an informed public as “the structural condition without which democracy degrades into either technocracy or rule by the uninformed” — technocracy being rule by experts and credentialed administrators on one pole, and rule by the uninformed crowd on the other. The implied lesson is that self-government needs enough public competence to receive expert work and “make reasoned judgments”; absent that competence, power slides toward one extreme or the other. It connects to the Democracy page as the form whose legitimacy an informed public underwrites.

Context: Technocracy is a model of governance in which authority rests with technical experts, scientists, or administrators chosen for specialized knowledge rather than with elected representatives or popular mandate. The term originated with an early-20th-century American movement and is now used more broadly — often critically — for expert-driven rule that bypasses democratic deliberation.

Where this appears

• Educated Electorate — named as one of the two failure modes (technocracy vs. rule by the uninformed) that democracy collapses into when the public is not educated enough to govern itself.
• Slopulism Is Taking Over America — the pole Populism defines itself against in the self-checkout debate.