Replication Data for: People Haven’t Had Enough of Experts: Technocratic Attitudes Among Citizens in Nine European Democracies

Political representation theory postulates that technocracy and populism mount a twofold challenge to party democracy, while also standing at odds with each other in the vision of representation they advocate. Can these relationships be observed empirically at the level of citizen preferences and what does this mean for alternative forms of representation? The article investigates technocratic attitudes among citizens following three dimensions – Expertise, Elitism, Anti-politics – and, using latent class analysis, identifies citizen groups that follow a technocratic, populist and party-democratic profile in nine European democracies. Results show that technocratic attitudes are pervasive and can be meaningfully distinguished from populist attitudes, though important overlaps remain. We investigate differences in demographics and political attitudes among citizen profiles that are relevant to political behavior and conclude by highlighting the role that citizens’ increasing demands for expertise play in driving preferences for alternative types of governance.