Technocratic Democracies: A Data and Code Repository

This repository accompanies the paper The Rise and Fall of Technocratic Democracies: Unstable Majorities and Delegation to Technocrats, and provides the full set of materials used in its construction, including the data sources, analysis code, and related literature.

For any queries, please contact Jacob Edenhofer at jacob.edenhofer@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

---

Repository Structure

.
├── .gitattributes
├── .gitignore
├── .Rhistory
├── 01 Raw Data/
│   ├── CAPMF/
│   ├── fiscal_rules/
│   └── romelli_cbei_index/
├── 02 Analysis code/
│   ├── climate_descriptives.ipynb
│   ├── fiscal_rules_descriptives.ipynb
│   └── romelli_descriptives.ipynb
├── 03 Literature/
│   ├── Attitudes/
│   └── [Extensive academic papers on technocracy, populism, and governance]
├── 04 Plots/
│   ├── cbie_heatmap.png
│   ├── cbie_lineplot.png
│   ├── climate_governance_adoption_by_region_over_time.png
│   └── total_cases_by_type_of_fiscal_rule_advanced.png

---

Contents Overview

• 01 Raw Data
  Contains raw datasets from multiple sources:

  • CAPMF (Climate Policy and Fiscal Measures Framework) datasets (Adoption, Stringency, Overall)
  • Fiscal Rules datasets (IMF and FAD sources)
  • Romelli Central Bank Independence Index with accompanying codebook

• 02 Analysis code
  Python notebooks used to generate descriptive statistics and plots:

  • Climate policy trends
  • Fiscal rule development
  • Central bank independence metrics

• 03 Literature
  A comprehensive library of scholarly papers on:

  • Populism, technocracy, and democratic institutions
  • Voter attitudes toward expertise
  • Institutional performance, legitimacy, and accountability

• 04 Plots
  Visualisations used in the paper, illustrating key trends and cross-country comparisons in governance data

---

Citation

If using this repository or referencing the accompanying paper, please cite as:

Gratton, G., & Edenhofer, J. (2025). The Rise and Fall of Technocratic Democracies: Unstable Majorities and Delegation to Technocrats. https://gratton.org/papers/TechnocraticDemocracies.pdf

---

Authors

📧 Gabriele Gratton, Website: gratton.org
📍 UNSW Business School, School of Economics
✉️ g.gratton@unsw.edu.au

📧 Jacob Edenhofer
📍 Nuffield College, University of Oxford
✉️ jacob.edenhofer@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

---