Public Support for “Alternatives” to Representative Democracy: a European Phenomenon?

In response to widespread dissatisfaction with representative actors and institutions, scholars have examined whether citizens are favorable toward alternative models of governance empowering either ordinary citizens or independent experts. However, the literature on citizens’ preferences regarding who should govern, also referred to as “process preferences”, has predominantly focused on European democracies, while studies of citizens in Asia and other regions are limited to examining support for a broadly defined “democratic political system” (Choi and Woo, 2024). This imbalance has led to several shortcomings. First, it has fostered an implicit assumption that citizens outside Europe lack sophisticated views about the roles of citizens and experts in politics, even though research on participatory democracy in India (Sanyal and Rao, 2019) or on technocracy in Southeast Asia (Khoo Boo et al., 2014) would suggest otherwise. Second, the focus on European democracies (where representative democracy is the dominant model) has contributed to the perception of citizens or experts as “alternatives”, particularly since support for participatory and technocratic arrangements is often found among individuals expressing higher levels of political cynicism or distrust. However, this pattern may not translate to Asian countries, where democratization has frequently followed a top-down trajectory (Kobayashi et al., 2021), and where economists, bureaucrats, and business elites have traditionally played prominent roles in politics as advisers, policymakers, or political leaders (Khalid and Abidin, 2014; Sajjanhar, 2021; North, 2005). Finally, the literature on process preferences has largely neglected citizens’ support for authoritarian models of governance, such as rule by a strong, unchecked leader or a dominant one-party system. Although such arrangements are more characteristic of hybrid regimes, they have become increasingly familiar to citizens in established democracies (Foa and Mounk, 2017). To address these shortcomings, we compare support for participatory, technocratic, and authoritarian models of governance across four Asian countries (India, Thailand, Japan, and Malaysia) and six European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom), based on a survey conducted in 2025 among samples of 1,500 respondents per country. While the survey items used to measure these models form distinct dimensions in all ten countries, we observe a positive correlation between participatory and authoritarian orientations across all cases, whereas the relationship between technocratic preferences and the other two models varies across countries. Preliminary findings indicate that participatory and technocratic models receive majority support in almost all countries, whereas authoritarian governance attracts substantially stronger support in the three Asian countries that do not qualify as liberal democracies. Nevertheless, between 20 and 30 percent of respondents in the six European countries also express agreement with authoritarian arrangements, including strong leadership, one-party rule, and military intervention. In most countries, support for governance by citizens or experts is driven primarily by cynicism toward politicians, rather than by generalized distrust in representative democracy. By contrast, support for an authoritarian model of governance is only underpinned by political cynicism in the European countries (and in India), and is associated with higher, rather than lower, levels of trust in representative democracy, particularly in the Asian cases.