Experts replacing governments? The socio-cultural and authoritarian roots of citizens’ preferences for experts in government in 58 countries

Technocracy is seen as a solution to the political challenges of our time by an increasing number of citizens. Using survey data from the World Value Survey, this study confirms the existence of a positive inclination towards experts replacing politicians as policy-makers in both democratic and non-democratic countries. Confirming what we already knew about individual drivers, citizens with low political interest and trust appear to be more supportive of experts in government. Counter-intuitively, a preference for right-wing market capitalism does not affect attitudes towards experts in government. The novelty of this study is that an expert-led model of governance is particularly appealing to citizens who oppose immigration (social conservatism) and, above all, to those who favour social order and control over democracy (authoritarianism). The latter finding holds across continents, highlighting that support for experts in government has common roots among individuals living in very different contexts. Despite this common trend, the cross-continent analyses reveal important divergences from the pooled patterns for other individual-level drivers, calling for further exploration of contextual factors.