The will for reason: voter demand for experts in office

Abstract

Populism and technocracy constitute the main challenges to party government. While significant research has been devoted to support for populism, less is known about voters’ demand for experts. In this study, a conjoint experiment in Spain to examine whether citizens prefer experts in executive positions is presented. It focuses on the most common form of expert participation in office: individuals who combine technical expertise and a party affiliation, the technopols. The conjoint experiment is complemented with a priming manipulation to examine to what extent the demand for experts depends on whether the crisis of representation is presented as a crisis of responsiveness or a crisis of responsibility. The results show that voters value expertise above any other candidate trait, including partisanship. Exposure to neither framing of the crisis substantially alters the strong demand for technopols. These findings contribute to the literature on voter attitudes towards the crisis of party government.

Keywords:

• Experts
• technocracy
• representative democracy
• party government
• conjoint experiments
• Spain

Acknowledgments

We thank Sofia Breitenstein, Jordi Muñoz, Luis Miller, Alexander Theodoiris, Elina Lindgren, Amuitz Garmendia and the anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback. We also thank participants at the 5^th Barcelona-Gothenburg-Bergen Workshop on Experimental Politics, the IPP Seminar at the Spanish National Research Council, the 1^st Workshop on Experiments, Politics and Sociology at Universidad Pablo Olavide, the IESA Workshop on Populism at the Spanish National Research Council in Cordoba, and the 26^th International Conference of Europeanists organized by the Council of European Studies. Jacob A. Otto provided excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The online-survey was implemented by Netquest between March 28th. and April 3rd., 2019; the sample included sex, age and regional quotas to achieve an accurate representation of the Spanish population; and a pre-registration plan for the analysis of our experiment was submitted to As Predicted: http://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x = as2bj8

2 The role of prime minister, although being the most intuitive to leverage credibility to the experiment, it is difficult to map to a specific competence, i.e. to an expert knowledge such as Health, Education or Agriculture.

3 Specifically, profile candidates with high expertise could only be 40 years or older and needed to have at least a college-level degree.

4 Although the order of candidate’s attributes was randomized, for each respondent the sequence was kept constant along the five rounds of voting.

5 See Table A.1 in the Online appendix for some descriptive values on selected and not-selected candidates by level of expertise in economics.

6 One dummy variable for combinations of high expertise candidate vs. high expertise candidate, and one dummy variable for a vote between low expertise candidate vs. low expertise candidate. The base category is for high expertise vs. low expertise (and vice versa).

7 This and all reported results are robust to estimates using nonlinear (probit) models and are available upon request.

8 Although this last result is statistically significant, it is important to emphasize that the dummy variable captures the contrast between the control group and the group that has received the lack of responsiveness treatment, but not the difference between the two primings. In fact, according to the results, we observe that both primes generate a negative coefficient and do not differ statistically from each other. This could be due to the fact that our manipulations have not been able to differentiate one from the other, or that the lack of responsibility treat is actually being interpreted as a statement about the absence of responsive politicians. We come back to this in the Discussion section.

9 Gender is inferred from silhouette and the name of the candidate. With the aim to present realistic profiles to respondents we have assigned fictional names to candidates generated with information from the National Statistic Institute of Spain. We created a list of the most frequent male and female first names and surnames between the 40’s and the 90’s for the whole regions of Spain with three exceptions: Catalonia, Basque Country and Galicia, for which we have made a unique set of names and surnames

10 With respect to party affiliation, the party family of each party goes as follows: Socialist Party (PSOE): centre-left/social-democrat; Popular Party (PP): conservatives; Podemos: radical-left; Citizens (Ciudadanos): right/liberal.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Educación y Universidades Research and Development Programme. Grant number: CSO2017-89847-P.

Notes on contributors

Sebastián Lavezzolo

Sebastian Lavezzolo is Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Department at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He received his PhD in Political Science from New York University. His research interests lie in the field of comparative political economy, with a particular focus on the relationship between politics and finance. Other fields of research in which he is interested include political history, political representation and political behaviour. His articles have appeared in journals such as European Political Science Review, Economic Systems, Comparative Migrations Studies or Journal of Business Research. [[email protected]]

Luis Ramiro

Luis Ramiro is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National Distance Education University, Spain. His research centers on parties, political organizations and political behaviour. His most recent publications have focused on the vote for radical-left parties (European Political Science Review, West European Politics, Political Studies and Party Politics), on the electoral effect of party primaries (Party Politics), on new parties and political attitudes (European Political Science Review) and on parties and social movement activists (Party Politics). [[email protected]]

Pablo Fernández-Vázquez

Pablo Fernández-Vázquez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He will join the Carlos III University in the summer of 2020. He studies political representation, both from the angle of the selection of politicians and from that of accountability for incumbent performance. Methodologically, he designs survey experiments, applies regression discontinuity designs, and uses text analysis to code political speeches. His work has been published in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, Party Politics and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. [[email protected]]