Publication: Technocratic Attitudes in COVID-19 Times: Change and Preference Over Types of Experts
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2021-10-01
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Wiley
Abstract
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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Keywords
Conjoint analysis, Covid-19, Experts, Spain, Technocratic attitudes
Bibliographic citation
Lavezzolo, S., Ramiro, L., & Fernández-Vázquez, P. (2021). Technocratic attitudes in COVID‐19 times: Change and preference over types of experts. European Journal of Political Research, 61(4), 1123-1142