Four types of politicians: bureaucratic, populist, charismatic and technocratic

A recent newspaper article “Mario Draghi: is Italy’s addiction to technocratic leaders a cause for concern?” argues that Italy has an unhealthy need for technocratic governments. As someone who has lived in Italy, I have always been much more worried about Italy’s unhealthy relationship with populist politicians. I can much more relate to technocratic politicians like Draghi than to populist politicians like Berlusconi or Trump.

I have never been overly interested in politics, however, my hunter-gatherer hypothesis had taken me deep into political territory. I have postulated that the four temperaments are derived from our ancestral modes of subsistence: hunting, gathering, farming and herding. Here they are with their respective tendencies in political leadership:

This scheme may seem completely arbitrary. However, if we look at power in hunter-gatherer bands, pastoralist segmentary lineage and centralised farming societies, it becomes clearer how the correspondences are motivated.

Foragers (hunter-gatherers) are egalitarian and have no such thing as a leader. People choose to follow a leader in times of need for two reasons only: competence (technocrats) and charisma (inspirational). In complex hunter-gatherer societies, these roles are often held by a war leader (chief, provisioning evolutionary profile) and a shaman or medicine man (caregiving evolutionary profile).

Farming, especially irrigation farming, leads to a centralised hierarchy that provides stability and tends to become bureaucratic. Pastoralists have segmentary lineages, with clans that are headed by a big man. The relationships within a clan are mostly egalitarian, however, members of a clan see themselves often superior to other clans (social dominance orientation, SDO). You can think of this like modern team sports, where there is little hierarchy within the team and the aim is to win against the opponent teams. The hierarchy can be seen in the ranking of the respective teams within a league.

In business leadership seminars the DISC system is often used. It is roughly the same system as mine with different terminology:

When Angela Merkel was elected German Chancellor I was not a huge fan of hers initially. However, she brought more stability to Europe than any other politician of her time. Though she may not have been a huge visionary and struggled with modern technology, her bureaucratic style did bring stability. Bureaucratic politicians tend to be elected by conservative voters, especially farmer types, who prefer slow, incremental change to major changes (stability and conservation).

Populist and charismatic politicians are often lumped together as they may be equally able to make a mess of a country. However, there are some significant differences. Populist politicians are highly in-group centred, even if they may appeal to a majority of people. Charismatic leaders, on the other hand, have no such boundaries and like hunter-gatherer bands are open, and distributed networks - anyone is welcome. In contrast, populists typically present an external threat in the form of immigrants, refugees or Muslims, which does not only resonate with pastoralist types but also farmer types who worry about stability.

Populism is therefore motivated by social dominance orientation and generally does not aim to benefit the population at large, whatever its claims are. They appeal to the masses, but really often only work for their in-group. Populist leaders are usually the first ones who consider themselves above the law and are often recognized by moral transgressions (see Donald Trump). What astonishes me, is that people often do not see such transgressions as red flags as if great leaders are allowed special privileges. Great leaders generally do not consider themselves as outside the law and moral conduct. Politicians who party hard with alcohol and/or prostitutes (no need to drop names here, there are plenty) should therefore present huge red flags, even for people who do or would like to enjoy such a lifestyle.

In order to understand why pastoralist populist leaders are a threat to democracy we need to dig deep into the evolutionary psychology of pastoralists. Pastoralists have evolved decentralised networks with shifting alliances that can scale up depending on the requirements:

A close family is usually the smallest and closest segment and will generally stand together. That family is also a part of a larger segment of more distant cousins and their families, who will stand with each other when attacked by outsiders. They are then part of larger segments with the same characteristics. If there is a conflict between brothers, it will be settled by all the brothers, and cousins will not take sides. If the conflict is between cousins, brothers on one side will align against brothers on the other side. However, if the conflict is between a member of a tribe and a non-member, the entire tribe, including distant cousins, could mobilise against the outsider and his or her allies. That tiered mobilisation is traditionally expressed, for example, in the Bedouin saying: "Me and my brothers against my cousins, me and my cousins against the world." (source Wikipedia)

In The Origins of Political Order (2011) Francis Fukuyama writes:

As we have seen in the case of the Nuer [pastoralists], tribal societies can scale up very rapidly during emergencies, with segments at various levels able to mobilize in tribal federations. Caesar, describing the Gauls he conquered, noted that when war broke out the tribes elected a common authority for the whole confederation, who only then had the power of life and death over his followers.31 It is for this reason that the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins described the segmentary lineage as “an organization of predatory expansion.”

There are many examples in history of such predatory pastoralist expansions: Yamnaya (Indo-Europeans), Huns and the Vikings. The empires those pastoralists built dissipated almost as quickly as they came into existence. And the reasons should be obvious: aversion against centralization, power struggles and extractive politics. Fukuyama writes:

In sharp contrast to the Christian princes of Europe, Mongol rulers saw themselves as pure predators whose avowed purpose was to extract resources from the populations they dominated. They were a tribal-level people who had no developed political institutions or theories of justice to transmit to the populations they conquered. They made no pretense that lordship existed for the sake of the ruled; unlike rulers of traditional agrarian states, they had short time horizons and were willing to extract resources at unsustainable levels.

While each type of governance can produce good or bad politicians, I haven’t been able to find any great populist politicians who did more for their country than themselves. Especially when unchecked such politicians quickly establish autocratic and oligarchic governments. Of course, an autocratic government can happen with any type of politician. Examples of each type of leader that ended in dictatorships are: Lenin (technocratic), Hitler (charismatic), Mussolini (populist) and Franco (bureaucratic).

Charismatic leaders like Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales may often seem somewhat incompetent, but they are at least motivated by an honest desire to make the world a more egalitarian place. Being a politician in today's complex and divided world is certainly a tough job. Of course, not every politician falls into one of these types and their personality type does not necessarily determine what kind of leader they are. Joe Biden, as far as I can tell, is a herder type like Trump, his leadership style somewhat beaurocratic. Yet, I am quite certain there is a pretty good correlation.