In your book, you challenge the traditional explanation of the populist argument and suggest that one should look at the growing distance between the government and the people. Therefore, direct democracy might be a valid option to address the problem of democratic drift. What is the status of the governments in our democracies?

There are two things I would like to touch upon. The first thing concerns the way people are thinking about populism. There is a lot of discussions going on about populism but a big part of the story is missing. What the book is saying is that when people have been talking about populism, they’ve been viewing it as something coming from fairly recent developments. For example, something that has to do with either economic or cultural anxiety. The book suggests that it is likely that it has much deeper roots than that. Moreover, it has to do with things that have been going on for possibly as long as the century just in the way that we have changed our governments in Western democracies for the better.

I think we have increasingly come to rely on experts. We created agencies, we turned over a lot of power to judges or technocrats. There are a lot of good reasons for that but what is the unanticipated side effect? We have created governments that are not very responsive to the people. They have turned over power to experts.

We are seeing to some extent the great importance of experts in governmental behaviour and so we need experts, but this has created disconnection in many cases. In this case, ordinary people feel like they do not know how to control the government, they sometimes do not know how decisions are made. They feel that it is slipping out of their control.

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