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Scholarly investigations have greatly advanced our understanding of gender stereotypes as they pertain to leadership roles. However, an examination of citizens' evaluations of the personal and political characteristics of ministers using an experimental design is still lacking. In this article, we aim to determine whether individuals exhibit discrimination against women occupying the position of finance minister (FM), which presents an opportunity to assess the impact of stereotypes within one of the most 'masculine' cabinet portfolios. We implement a conjoint analysis in Spain to isolate the influence of appointees' attributes on their selection. The results suggest that women are preferred for this post. In contrast to established knowledge derived from legislative studies, being single benefits female ministers more than it does their male counterparts in obtaining the position of FM, as agentic attributes can hold more value in these positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, new and challenger parties have enjoyed electoral gains in some European countries. Political and economic disaffection have been pointed out as the main drivers of their electoral support. This article proposes voter’s stealth democracy attitudes, as defined by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, as an additional driving force to account for this electoral change. We examine the case of Spain with a survey conducted after the far-reaching transformation of the party system, which has led to the emergence of two new parties: Ciudadanos (on the center-right) and Podemos (on the radical-left). We find that stealth democracy attitudes are positively related to the support for the former and negatively related to the support for the latter. Additionally, we provide evidence of this relationship being conditional on voters’ ideology. The study illustrates how an unexplored attitudinal dimension contributes to party system change, and how the relevance of these attitudes might go beyond the temporary political discontent caused by the economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Meanwhile too much attention is focused in economic voting, a previous question has been hardly addressed: how the economy affects turnout rates. Does economic adversity raise the level of turnout? Or contrary: Do macroeconomic drops demobilize voters? In this paper I analyse the relationship between some macroeconomic variables and levels of turnout in Latina America between 1980 and 2000. I do it through the study of aggregated variables. Results challenge the main findings of the literature for developing countries: hard times are not related with higher turnout, though unemployment seems to have a particular relationship. In addition, the data shows political demobilization as a by product of voters disaffection. Such findings involve critical implications for accountability issues, democratic representation, and the electoral strategies of political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]