People Haven't Had Enough of Experts: Technocratic Attitudes among Citizens in Nine European Democracies
Journal
American Journal of Political Science
ISSN
1540-5907
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2020-08-20
Author(s)
Abstract
Political representation theory postulates that technocracy and populism mount a twofold challenge to party democracy, while also standing at odds with each other in the vision of representation they advocate. Can these relationships be observed empirically at the level of citizen preferences, and what does this mean for alternative forms of representation? The article investigates technocratic attitudes among citizens following three dimensions-expertise, elitism, and antipolitics-and, using latent class analysis, identifies citizen groups that follow a technocratic, populist, and party-democratic profile in nine European democracies. Results show that technocratic attitudes are pervasive and can be meaningfully distinguished from populist attitudes, though important overlaps remain. We investigate differences in demographics and political attitudes among citizen profiles that are relevant to political behavior and conclude by highlighting the role that citizens' increasing demands for expertise play in driving preferences for alternative types of governance Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American
Publisher
Wiley
Volume
66
Number
1
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Name
People Havent Had Enough of Experts.pdf
Size
1.14 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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