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Contemporary democracies are increasingly confronted with forms of complexity that challenge established models of governance. Globalisation, climate change, migration, health crises, economic interdependence, geopolitical instability and the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence have multiplied actors, levels of decision-making and relations of interdependence, generating emergent effects that cannot be fully predicted or controlled.
Yet the central problem may not simply be how political systems manage increasing complexity, but how they respond to the intrinsic complexity and indeterminacy of democratic life itself. Rather than learning to inhabit complexity and uncertainty, contemporary political systems increasingly appear to pursue simplification: the reduction of plurality, uncertainty and conflict in the attempt to restore predictability, control and decisional efficiency. Such a tendency raises fundamental questions about the sustainability of democratic values.
This panel focuses on two apparently different strategies of simplification: populism and technocracy. Populist forms of authoritarianism tend to simplify complexity through the centralisation of power, the construction of homogeneous political identities and the suppression or delegitimation of dissent. Technocratic approaches, by contrast, tend to relocate decision-making towards experts, procedures, metrics and increasingly algorithmic systems, thereby transforming political and social questions into apparently neutral problems of technical optimisation.
The panel asks whether these should be understood as genuinely distinct political configurations or, rather, as different expressions of a deeper response to complexity: the attempt to make a complex, uncertain and emergent social reality appear simpler, more controllable and more predictable. It further explores whether their convergence could produce hybrid forms of governance in which political authoritarianism and technocratic decisionism coexist, while democratic participation risks being reduced to a symbolic or rhetorical function.
Bringing together political science, political theory, political sociology, complexity studies, science and technology studies, and AI research, the panel invites both theoretical and empirical contributions on how democracies can move beyond the imperative of simplification and develop the capacity to inhabit complexity, uncertainty and indeterminacy without abandoning plurality, participation and democratic agency.