This shift is puzzling: Why do people like technocrats despite their lack of responsiveness and accountability to voters?

A recent study by Jeanne Marlier, Matthias Kaltenegger, and Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik investigates this disparity in a pre-registered survey experiment that engages with the perceived upsides and downsides of technocrats. Building on previous research that found technocrats’ expertise and party independence to be highly valued by voters, they seek to uncover the dynamics behind these perceptions.

According to existing research in the field, not only do voters view technocrats as more responsible than party politicians, but those who do are also less likely to vote and more likely to vote for new parties. As scholars have shown, technocratic appointments may be used strategically by political parties in times of crisis to (re)gain voters’ trust.

Building on this work, Marlier et al. (2025) develop five hypotheses:

1.      Voters perceive partisan ministers as having lower levels of issue competence than non-partisan ministers.

Since partisan ministers are constrained by electoral cycles and party competition, and as scholars have observed a growing distrust in their competency, Marlier et al. (2025) expect a negative influence of partisanship on perceived issue competence.

2.      The positive effect of expertise on issue competence perceptions is lower for partisan ministers than for non-partisan ministers.

The authors expect a negative spillover effect between partisanship and expertise, in which the expertise would have a weaker effect on perceived issue competence for partisan ministers.

3.      The negative effect of partisanship on perceived issue competence is lower for party supporters than for other respondents.

Voters’ party preference is expected to moderate the negative effect of partisanship: in this case, a minister’s partisanship would not have a negative effect on issue competence among voters who support the minister’s party.

4.      Voters perceive partisan ministers as having higher bargaining competence than non-partisan ministers.

Since party politicians frequently have greater political weight, including established networks and a better understanding of party politics, they are expected to garner higher perceptions of bargaining competence.

5.      The positive effect of expertise on bargaining competence is higher for partisans than for non-partisan ministers.

Lastly, Marlier et al. (2025) expect a positive spillover effect between expertise and partisanship on bargaining competence.

To test their hypotheses, the authors focused on the case of Austria, using a survey experiment fielded as part of the online panel of the Austrian National Election Study with 3,072 participants (fielded between Oct. 10-16, 2022) (Partheymüller et al. 2022). In a two-by-two survey experimental design, participants were presented with fictional ministers from two portfolios: Economic Affairs and Education. For each portfolio, partisanship was randomized to be either ÖVP-affiliated or independent, while the minister’s expertise was signaled through job experience. Non-experts held a general position as an office clerk, while experts had portfolio-specific experience: managing director of a retail company (economic affairs) and headmaster of secondary school (education). Participants were asked two questions, one on issue competence and one on bargaining competence, and rated the minister on each using 11-point scales.

In their analysis, Marlier et al. (2025) find decidedly complex relationships between minister’s expertise, their partisanship and voters’ perceptions of their competencies.

First, as expected, they find that partisanship has a negative effect on perceived issue competence. Voters thus perceive party politicians as having inherently less policy-specific issue competence. Not least, the positive effect of expertise on perceived issue competence is weaker for partisan than for nonpartisan ministers, suggesting that voters place comparatively less value on the policy-specific expertise of party politicians. Marlier et al. (2025) also find strong support for the expectations that perceptions of ministers’ competence are moderated by voters’ political predispositions: the higher their propensity to vote for the minister’s party, the smaller the negative impact of the minister’s partisanship on competence perceptions (for strong party supporters the effect disappears or even nudges into positive territory).

Secondly, as expected, the study finds a positive effect of partisanship on bargaining competence. This indicates that voters also perceive important advantages of being governed by party politicians, namely their ability to negotiate support for their policy proposals. However, the authors find no support for the expectation that the positive effect of expertise on bargaining competence is higher for partisans than for non-partisan ministers.

Summing up, Marlier et al. (2025) show that voters perceive technocracy as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, associating distinct advantages and disadvantages with ministers’ expertise and their (non-)partisanship. However, voters do not evaluate these dimensions independently from each other. Rather, perceptions of one dimension of technocracy—non-partisanship—spill over into perceptions of the other—expertise. Amongst other things, these findings have important implications for the strategic use of technocratic appointments to enhance the publics’ trust in government.