Legitimacy at Risk? Comparing Citizen and Expert Responses to Policy Adoption of Science

The COVID 19 pandemic renewed debates about the role of experts in democratic governance, accompanied by rising public support for technocratic decision making. Yet it remains unclear when expert input enhances legitimacy and when it risks undermining it. This paper addresses these questions through a large-scale vignette experiment in Flanders that compares the reactions of two central actors: citizens and experts. We examine legitimacy at two levels: (1) how government adoption, rejection, or concealment of expert advice shapes perceived legitimacy, and (2) how these effects differ between citizens who delegate authority to experts and experts whose advice is incorporated into policymaking. Moving beyond prior work on maximalist technocracy - where experts replace elected officials - we focus on minimalist technocracy, in which experts advise but politicians retain final authority. This model introduces meaningful variation in expert–government relations, raising new questions about how legitimacy is evaluated across input, throughput, and output dimensions. Using a 4×2 mixed design, we manipulate both government alignment with expert advice and the type of policy domain (moral vs. technical). Respondents evaluated hypothetical decision-making scenarios, enabling us to identify whether legitimacy judgments hinge on issue characteristics or reflect broader patterns of political distrust. The findings will reveal dynamics in how expert involvement can bolster legitimacy, but may also erode support when advice is followed or ignored, echoing deliberative concerns about “voice without impact”. By integrating both citizen and expert perspectives, the study advances a multi actor account of technocratic legitimacy and contributes to broader debates on democratic representation, the boundaries of expert authority, and the conditions under which scientific input strengthens - or threatens - legitimacy.