More diverse than previously thought: Identifying political process preference types among citizens from 9 European countries

Research on citizens’ attitudes towards how government should run is expanding but limited in two respects: most studies have only focused on preferences for elected politicians versus ordinary citizens or independent experts as decision-makers and most studies do not consider preferences for combinations of actors. To address these shortcomings, we analysed how citizens from nine European countries scored on a new battery of 25 survey items capturing preferences for a variety of political actors and governing styles, originally proposed by Hibbing and colleagues (2022). The data were analysed through multi-group latent classes analysis, a method that is well-suited to identifying discrete clusters of individuals with similar patterns of response across multiple indicators. Our results point to six different groups: ‘hybrid democrats’ express moderate levels of support for both citizen- and expert-oriented alternatives to elected politicians; ‘participatory democrats’ demand a much greater role for ordinary citizens at the expense of other actors; ‘pure technocrats’ are exclusively favorable towards empowering independent experts and scientists; ‘stealth populists’ envision a combination of independent experts and referenda (while being skeptical of citizens' political capabilities); ‘responsive democrats’ place ordinary citizens’ and elected politicians’ capabilities of governing on an equal footing; and ‘pure representative democrats’ reject any alternative to decision-making by elected politicians.