Since Plato, those sceptical of the ability of ordinary citizens to make political decisions have often argued for some form of rule by ‘wise’ experts. Using the 2011 Finnish National Election Study, I compared popular support for representative democracy with support for expert rule. I had two working hypotheses I wanted to test. On the one hand the #competence hypothesis’ suggests that high political competence on the part of citizens is negatively associated with support for expert decision making. In other words, the better citizens are at making political decisions the less they want experts to do it for them. On the other hand, the ‘disillusionment hypothesis’ assumes that politically disappointed citizens will support expert rule. In testing these hypotheses against Finnish election data, I found much less support for stealth democracy that other studies have suggested. Overall I found that the evidence supported the disillusionment hypothesis, suggesting that it is the politically disappointed that will support the replacement of representative democracy with the rule of experts.
Read the full study here.
