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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial models derived from Downs's theory assume that voters' preferences are exogenous to the political process. According to this vision, vote-maximising parties have to move towards the median voter and not vice versa. In this article we challenge this assumption and study the capacity of political parties to lead the preferences of the electorate. The article focuses on two cases of political moderation: Tony Blair in the United Kingdom and Jose Maria Aznar in Spain. Our results confirm that to some extent these political leaders were able to modify the preferences of the electorate, although their capacity to do so depended on voters' identification with or loyalty towards the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]