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Populism and technocracy represent a challenge to pluralist party democracies. The first promotes the rule by 'the people', while the second demands the rule by independent experts. The literature on populism and technocracy as challenges to party democracy is burgeoning. Less is known about citizens' attitudes towards the ideas that underpin both populism and technocracy. In this article these opinions are explored in a survey conducted in Spain using a comprehensive battery of items tapping into technocracy and populism. It is found that populist attitudes correlate with two dimensions of technocracy: anti-politics and pro-expertise sentiments. A latent-class analysis shows that the largest sample group simultaneously endorses rule by the people and the enrolment of experts in political decision making. In the article this group is named technopopulists. The article challenges extant views of populism and technocracy as separate alternatives and spurs works on voter demand for the involvement of experts in politics. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2027116. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]