Open government policies (on transparency, participation, and collaboration, but also on digital technology) are spreading across Europe as a new governance model, but are not homogeneous across different countries. By adopting a qualitative computer‐assisted analysis of policy documents from France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, we mapped the different meanings of open government by examining the specific measures and key motivations for their adoption in order to find out how different national governments frame the variables of open government. The article shows the emergence of competing models of open government: on the one hand, the hegemonic model of open government seems to stress innovation and openness in the sense of an enhanced transparency, and occasionally of public–private collaboration, but failing to achieve an open decision making. We have detected a paradox in the open government implementation: the economic lens, although softened by a drive toward innovation, anchors the policy‐making process in already‐consolidated mechanisms, rather than in substantive change. On the other hand, we can foresee the emergence of a different perspective on open government, which provides a proper policy framework for democratic innovations to develop.

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In recent years, the scientific debate on populism has experienced a new momentum: on the one hand, the emergence of new populisms even in Western democracies and on the other hand, disagreement among scholars on the definition of populism. In this context, new trends have emerged-such as those concerning the link between populism and technology-along with the need to revise the traditional study paradigms, which are often difficult to operationalise. The transformation of the political sphere appears to be strongly interconnected with the digital media landscape. If the new forms of communication are the cause or the effect of processes, such as the personalisation of leadership, the verticalisation of political organisations, the presidentialisation of political parties, or the social delegitimisation of the old "intermediate bodies", these forms should be the subject of ongoing research. At the same time, a very simplistic storyline tries to overlap the rise of neo-populist parties with their use of communication technologies. A quality that is common to the many different populisms is an appeal to the use of direct democracy as a tool to empower citizens. Populism itself is sometimes portrayed as almost synonymous with direct democracy. At the same time, direct democracy is used by populists as a critique of the lack of participation in representative democracy and the need to make it more participatory. In this perspective, technology becomes a tool (and a storyline) to facilitate the use of direct democracy and the rise of a new form of "hyper-representation". At the same time, concepts such as efficiency, privatisation, short-termism, newism, and meritocracy are keywords successfully used by populist leaders, technocracy élites and neo-liberal political leaders. In other words, we can highlight a strange meeting between technological storytelling about direct democracy and technocracy myths. Even among the new populist parties, the technopopulists appear to represent an important category, whose peculiarities can easily be put into evidence using some empirical tools (such as content analysis). The aim of this article is to investigate the relationships between technocracy, direct democracy's storytelling and hyper-representation as a distinctive characteristic of neo-populisms.