Technocratic attitudes: a citizens’ perspective of expert decision-making

Abstract

Despite repeated appointments of technocratic governments in Europe and increasing interest in technocracy, there is little knowledge regarding citizens' attitudes towards technocracy and the idea of governance by unelected experts. This article revisits normative debates and hypothesises that technocracy and democracy stand in a negative relationship in the eyes of European citizens. It tests this alongside a series of hypotheses on technocratic attitudes combining country-level institutional characteristics with individual survey data. While findings confirm that individual beliefs about the merits of democracy influence technocratic attitudes, two additional important factors are also identified: first, levels of trust in current representative political institutions also motivate technocratic preferences; second, historical legacies, in terms of past party-based authoritarian regime experience, can explain significant cross-national variation. The implications of the findings are discussed in the broader context of citizen orientations towards government, elitism and the mounting challenges facing representative democracy.

Commitment or expertise? Technocratic appointments as political responses to economic crises

“…As Roberts () convincingly argues, financial crises can have deep and long‐term effects on the political system, depending on whether social‐democratic or centre‐right parties implemented austerity measures. Moreover, economic crises can strengthen voters’ support of technocratic governance (Bertsou & Pastorella ).…”

Citizens' Contrasting Aspirations About Their Political System: Entrustment, Participation, Identification and Control

“…Several authors show that reforms reinforcing the role of citizens in the political process are supported by young, educated, politically interested and post-materialist individuals (Donovan and Karp, 2006;Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Norris, 2011;Dalton and Welzel, 2014;Schuck and de Vreese, 2015;Dalton, 2017). Other authors demonstrate that support for alternatives such as the empowerment of experts, lay citizens, or direct democracy is linked with a strong disenchantment with representative democracy (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Neblo et al, 2010;Webb, 2013;Schuck and de Vreese, 2015;del Río et al, 2016;Bertsou and Pastorella, 2017;Gherghina and Geissel, 2018). Political orientation also matters: left-wing oriented individuals are more supportive of participatory mechanisms, whereas right-wing individuals are more prone to support technocratic mechanisms (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Bertsou and Pastorella, 2017).…”

“…Other authors demonstrate that support for alternatives such as the empowerment of experts, lay citizens, or direct democracy is linked with a strong disenchantment with representative democracy (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Neblo et al, 2010;Webb, 2013;Schuck and de Vreese, 2015;del Río et al, 2016;Bertsou and Pastorella, 2017;Gherghina and Geissel, 2018). Political orientation also matters: left-wing oriented individuals are more supportive of participatory mechanisms, whereas right-wing individuals are more prone to support technocratic mechanisms (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Bertsou and Pastorella, 2017). Finally, recent studies have shown that individuals who are more politically and socially marginalized are more likely to support various alternatives to the political status quo (Ceka and Magalhães, 2020), such as the increased use of referendums (Bowler and Donovan, 2019) or sortition (Vandamme et al, 2018;Bedock and Pilet, 2020).…”

The Design of Pseudo-Participation

“…Rather, sometimes the aim is to start a process to only give an impression of real engagement. This is known as technocratic clientelism ("state-led regime with clientelistic mediation between the state and society" [19, p.17]) and it is characterized by an appearance of political effectiveness by the creation of participatory processes, where both popular control and people's agency are virtually non-existent [3,18,19]. Technocratic clientelism is part of a larger phenomenon of pseudoparticipation.…”