The research on ruling technocrats is vast and mainly motivated by the basic assumption that their presence in government entails some kind of anomaly for democracies (Meynaud, 1964; Pastorella, 2016). In this vein, representative democracy have become strongly associated with the principles of party government, whereby executive offices are the golden target of political parties and the last point of the chain of delegation (Dalton, Farrell, & McAllister, 2011; Katz, 1986). From this perspective, non-partisan ministers should be considered a rare phenomenon (Strom, 2000). Therefore, the basic expectation in ministerial studies has been long-time to find cabinet portfolios occupied by partisan politicians (Laver & Shepsle, 1994).

However, technocrats might not be such a novelty if we take a historical perspective, and its relationship with the quality of democracy could have less dramatic implications. In this vein, our paper aims to analyse the presence of technocrats in European governments since the First World War, and check which factors help to explain their evolution over time. Additionally, we would like to explore the effect of technocrats in the quality of democratic regimes.

The paper will employ data from the Who Governs dataset, including the proportion of non-political ministers in democratic cabinets since 1918, covering all countries of the continent. We combine this original dataset with information from the V-Dem project, in order to check the relationship between technocrats and the quality of democracy over time. Our preliminary findings suggest two counterintuitive outcomes: technocrats (or non-political ministers) are not so rare neither new in European democracies; and their increase has gone in parallel with the increase of democratic quality.