Ciudadanía, políticos y expertos en la toma de decisiones políticas la percepción de las cualidades de los actores políticos importan

Abstract

¿Qué factores explican que la ciudadanía prefiera políticos, ciudadanos o expertos en la toma de decisiones políticas? Este artículo demuestra que la falta de apoyo al sistema político desempeña un papel relevante. A su vez, encontramos que la valoración que hace la ciudadanía sobre las cualidades morales y técnicas de los actores tradicionales en democracia (élite política y ciudadanía) ayuda a perfilar mejor la naturaleza de sus preferencias. A partir del análisis de los datos de una encuesta del CIS del año 2011, mostramos que los factores mencionados son relevantes para entender cómo se vertebran las preferencias ciudadanas sobre quién debe tomar las decisiones políticas en democracia. A su vez, nuestros resultados sostienen algunos de los argumentos de Hibbing y Theiss-Morse, mientras que otros deben ser revisados.

The devil is in the detail: What do citizens mean when they support stealth or participatory democracy?

“…On the other hand, research about preferences for expert government has found no conclusive results. For example, Finland shows no significant effect for ideology (Rapeli, 2016), and Spain shows an association with right-wing ideology (Del Río et al, 2016). As a result, we can expect left wing citizens to prefer participatory to stealth-based models, but also prefer expert based than business-based ones.…”

“…Is any kind of stealth government equally desirable for those who wish to move in this direction? Previous research has shown that a certain degree of diversity exists (Del Río et al, 2016), but this issue has not been fully explored in comparative perspective.…”

“…Most of the European empirical literature building on the subject concludes that ideology plays an important role in shaping citizen preferences for political decision-making processes. For example, right wing ideology amongst Spaniards and Finns shows a significant positive effect upon support for stealth democracy (Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009; Del Río et al, 2016) suggesting that, at least in Europe, ideology is the main factor explaining support for stealth or participatory models as alternatives to existing representative democracy. It is notable that ideology also explains preferences regarding similar issues like intra-party democracy (Close et al, 2017).…”

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

“…A growing share of the population supports the idea to give more opportunities to citizens to get involved in the political process, or even to make them the main policy-makers (Webb, 2013;Font et al, 2015;Bengtsson and Christensen, 2016;del Río et al, 2016;Gherghina and Geissel, 2017). Some studies focus on more specific instruments of participation, such as referendums (Bowler et al, 2007;Bengtsson and Mattila, 2009;Schuck and de Vreese, 2015;Bowler and Donovan, 2019), deliberative democracy (Neblo et al, 2010;Caluwaerts et al, 2018), or sortition to involve citizens or even replace politicians in the decision-making process (Bedock and Pilet, 2020).…”

“…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).…”