RT Journal Article
T1 Technocratic Attitudes in COVID-19 Times: Change and Preference Over Types of Experts
A1 Lavezzolo Pérez, Sebastián
A1 Ramiro Fernandez, Luis Jose
A1 Fernández Vázquez, Pablo Alberto
AB 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 andthe heterogeneity in the demand for experts depending on the context. We first analyze how technocratic attitudeshave been affected by an external event, the COVID-19 pandemic, that has placed experts’ role at the forefront of thepublic debate; this allows us to analyze the stability or change in these attitudes. Second, given that the pandemicquickly evolved from being a public health issue to becoming a political issue combining economic and publichealth dimensions, we examine whether framing the COVID-19 pandemic exclusively as a public health problem oras including a prominent economic dimension as well affects the type of public officials who are preferred to lead thepolitical management of the crisis (independent experts with diverse professional skills or party politicians belongingto different parties and with a specialization in different policy fields). We pursue these two research goals througha panel survey conducted in Spain at two different time points, one before and another during the pandemic, inwhich we measure technocratic attitudes using an exhaustive battery; and through a survey experiment combining aconjoint design and a framing experiment. Results show that, first, technocratic attitudes have significantly increasedas a consequence of the coronavirus outbreak; second, people’s preference for experts prevails against any otherexperimental treatment such as party affiliation; and, finally, preferences for the type of experts vary depending onthe problem to be solved. In this way, this paper significantly increases our knowledge of the factors that affectvariation in public attitudes towards experts’ involvement in political decision-making.
PB Wiley
SN 0304-4130
YR 2021
FD 2021-10-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/34255
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/34255
LA eng
NO This research was supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness Program. Grant number: CSO2017-89847-P. Luis Ramiro benefited from a grant by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (France), Programme Directeurs d'Etudes Associés DEA 2020.
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RD 1 sept. 2024