The will for reason: voter demand for experts in office

Lavezzolo, Sebastián; Ramiro, Luis; Fernández-Vázquez, Pablo

doi:10.1080/01402382.2020.1778917

Cited by 26 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Existing scholarship points to a number of reasons why citizens may support more power assigned to experts, depending on the political role at hand. First, the impartiality of independent experts is a particularly welcome influence on policy making (Lavezzolo et al 2020). Although the act of framing and designing a policy entails political power, public policy with its emphasis on evidence-based criteria for policy making, has provided the basis for public acceptance of such power in the hands of unaccountable experts (Schudson 2006).…”

Section: Public Preferences For Independent Expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bring in the experts? Citizen preferences for independent experts in political decision‐making processes

Bertsou

2021

European J Political Res

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Do citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand expert involvement in political decision-making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non-transparent nature of expertbased governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across 'hard' and 'easy' political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians.

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Section: Public Preferences For Independent Expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bring in the experts? Citizen preferences for independent experts in political decision‐making processes

Bertsou

2021

European J Political Res

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“…First, we assume in our discussion that outsiderness and expertise are two independent dimensions. While the literature on technocrats often combines these two dimensions and defines technocrats as experts without political or partisan affiliation (McDonnell and Valbruzzi, 2014), we argue that outsiders are not necessarily experts (Marsh et al, 2010;Street, 2012) and insiders are not necessarily non-experts (Lavezzolo et al, 2021).…”

Section: Conceptual Premisesmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Unlike outsiderness, expertise is always a desirable trait in ministerial candidates. Expert ministers are likely to govern more effectively than non-experts (Alexiadou, 2016) and voters prefer to be governed by people who know what they are doing (Lavezzolo et al, 2021). Expertise among government personnel also functions as an additional source of political legitimacy, independent of the party label.…”

Section: Experts Vs Non-expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who’s fit for the job? Allocating ministerial portfolios to outsiders and experts

Kaltenegger

Ennser‐Jedenastik

2022

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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Why do parties appoint outsiders and experts to ministerial positions? Extant research offers explanations based on institutional arrangements and external shocks (e.g. political or economic crises). We go beyond such system-level variables to argue that the characteristics of ministerial appointees are a function of the portfolio they are being appointed to. Drawing on theories of political delegation, we argue that outsider and expert appointments to ministerial office are affected by a portfolio’s policy jurisdiction, its financial resources and appointment powers, and the partisan leanings of the ministerial bureaucracy. We test these arguments on all appointments of senior and junior ministers in Austria between 1945 and 2020. The analysis shows that outsiders are more likely to be appointed to ministries with greater party support in the bureaucracy, while experts are more likely appointed to portfolios dealing with high-salience issues.

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“…A party politician might possess relevant expertise in a policy field, but that will not make her a technocrat because she is not an independent expert. Party politicians who have a professional specialization in a policy field and perform a government role are known as technopols (Alexiadou, 2020) and they have been found to be preferred to non‐specialized party politicians in some contexts (Lavezzolo et al., 2020), but they are not technocrats. Amidst this variety of different types of experts, one of our main goals and contributions is to understand better how the preference for the involvement of experts and technocrats in political decision making develops, and what are the mechanisms that make individuals prefer one type of expert above another.…”

Section: Technocratic Attitudes Their Stability and The Preference Fo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Technocratic attitudes in COVID‐19 times: Change and preference over types of experts

Lavezzolo

Ramiro

Fernández-Vázquez

2021

European J Political Res

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Western publics show a sizable support for experts’ involvement in political decision making, that is, technocratic attitudes. This article analyzes two key aspects of these attitudes: technocratic attitudes’ stability and the heterogeneity in the demand for experts depending on the context. We first analyze how technocratic attitudes have been affected by an external event, the COVID‐19 pandemic, that has placed experts’ role at the forefront of the public debate; this allows us to analyze the stability or change in these attitudes. Second, given that the pandemic quickly evolved from being a public health issue to becoming a political issue combining economic and public health dimensions, we examine whether framing the COVID‐19 pandemic exclusively as a public health problem or as including a prominent economic dimension as well affects the type of public officials who are preferred to lead the political management of the crisis (independent experts with diverse professional skills or party politicians belonging to different parties and with a specialization in different policy fields). We pursue these two research goals through a panel survey conducted in Spain at two different time points, one before and another during the pandemic, in which we measure technocratic attitudes using an exhaustive battery; and through a survey experiment combining a conjoint design and a framing experiment. Results show that, first, technocratic attitudes have significantly increased as a consequence of the coronavirus outbreak; second, people's preference for experts prevails against any other experimental treatment such as party affiliation; and, finally, preferences for the type of experts vary depending on the problem to be solved. In this way, this paper significantly increases our knowledge of the factors that affect variation in public attitudes towards experts’ involvement in political decision‐making.

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The will for reason: voter demand for experts in office

Cited by 26 publications

References 51 publications

Bring in the experts? Citizen preferences for independent experts in political decision‐making processes

Bring in the experts? Citizen preferences for independent experts in political decision‐making processes

Who’s fit for the job? Allocating ministerial portfolios to outsiders and experts

Technocratic attitudes in COVID‐19 times: Change and preference over types of experts

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