Do citizens approve of technocrats? Analyzing attitudes toward technocrats in thirty-one European democracies 1999–2021

type="graphical" xml:id="gpol12219-abs-0001"> There is agreement across the various contributions to the special issue that the state of democratic systems has deteriorated – not only in Europe but also in the United States. Of course, attention must be paid to the different contexts, reasons and the degrees to which democracies are experiences a period of unease. There is also agreement as to the necessity of national democracies - and the EU as a supranational political actor - to re-think current practices and to allow for a new democratic ethos that gives greater room for contestation.

How do economic conditions affect public opinion about climate change? Since the early days of the modern environmental movement, people have debated three main perspectives on how economic conditions impact environmental attitudes. The post-materialism perspective suggests that social and individual affluence leads to increasing concern and demands for action on climate change through long-run cultural change. A second view suggests that attitudes about climate change are shaped largely independently of economic conditions and reflect the emergence of a new environmental paradigm. A third view, associated with ecological modernization theory, suggests that attitudes about climate change are shaped in important ways by short-term economic factors, such as economic self-interest, and are likely to vary among citizens over time. While all of these perspectives have merit, we emphasize the impact of macroeconomic risk and business cycle fluctuations in shaping public attitudes toward climate change and more general aspects of environmental policy. Rising unemployment rates, for example, tend to be associated with declines in concern about environmental problems. This is a trend that is repeated across more than four decades and multiple recessions and recoveries dating back to the 1970s. Although it is obviously a more recently recognized environmental problem, public attitudes about climate change are also affected considerably by short-run economic conditions. This fact can influence the possibilities for policy reform. Through a process of motivated reasoning, in which immediate concerns and preferences to address economic risk lead individuals to adjust other attitudes about the environment, public concerns about climate change have ebbed and flowed with the business cycle. Other economic factors—such as societal affluence, personal employment status, or income—have more limited effects on attitudes about climate change, at least in most developed countries. The impact of economic risk on public attitudes about climate change has important implications for policy reform in democratic societies, because public support matters. While partisanship and ideology are frequently cited as explanations for fluctuating public opinion about climate change, macroeconomic risk offers a complementary explanation, which suggests that the framing and timing of environmental policy initiatives is as important as ideological acceptability. Positioning environmental actions or initiatives in better economic conditions, emphasizing immediate economic benefits, and countering unwarranted beliefs about personal costs, especially during challenging economic circumstances, should improve the prospects for efforts to address climate change.

The article is devoted to the comparison of the concepts of technocracy/technocratic governance and democracy, as well as checking how democratic a nature of technocratic governance is. It was argued that technocratic governance is in opposition to democracy, but rather borders with autocracy (non-democracy) and found out that technocratic governance leads to weakening the procedures of delegation of authority and accountability between voters and parties, parties and governments, increasing external pressure on politicians and weakening ideological patterns of political process. The researcher confirmed that technocratic governments lack political competition, participation of citizens as key “principals” of democratic political regimes and political legitimacy. However, it was conceptualized that technocratic governance has both positive and negative moments through the prism of democracy: positive moments are short-term and negative moments are long-term. The author determined that the formation of technocratic governments in the long-term/repetitive perspective is not democratic, because it leads to patrimonialism of various inter-institutional relations. On the other hand, it was found that the more democratic is a political system, the greater is the likelihood that technocratic governments and technocratic governance will be temporary.

Corruption is important because it undermines bureaucratic predictability and is a potential threat to support for a political regime. The perception of corruption is the most commonly used measure of the actual incidence of corruption. This article marshals the New Russia Barometer survey data to challenge this assumption. Even though most Russians perceive a variety of everyday public services as corrupt, this assessment is not based on first-hand experience. Only a minority pays bribes. We test four hypotheses about differences in individual perception and experience of paying bribes: the ability to pay, contact with public services, normative acceptability and political awareness. Contact is most important for paying bribes whereas political awareness is most important for the perception of corruption. We also test how much the perception and experience of corruption, as against other forms of political and economic performance, affect support for the regime. Support is driven by the substantive performance of government, especially its management of the economy, rather than by the perception or experience of corruption.

The quality of democracy is a new concept that tries to explain the reason why democracies have different levels of performance. In 1959, by calculating average of some variables of welfare, Lipset showed that democracies have a better economic performance than another type of regime. By applying simple linear regressions and instrumental-variables regressions, it was found that the Rule of Law, accountability through voting and accountability through the institutions cause economic and social performance in Europe. Electoral participation and membership do not have a direct effect on the results that government offers, but make these procedural elements more effective. In the same way, more years of democracy do not guarantee a better performance but also have an indirect effect in the Rule of Law, accountability through voting and accountability through the institutions in Europe. Citizens' perceptions about the quality of democracy in Europe vary to a very slow pace unless there is a great change on the procedural elements. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3s1p103

In the quest for integrity and transparency, the perception of corruption within a state not only undermines trust in governance but also hinders sustainable progress. This study investigates the relationship between education, economic performance, and governance and their impact on the assessment of corruption in the context of sustainable development goals. The research framework included data from 14 European countries, members of the Schengen zone, using panel data for the period 2003-2022. The analysis of the sample indicators guided us to apply further advanced research methods. Principal Components Analysis was applied to reduce dimensionality. Under various assumptions related to heterogeneity, stationarity and exogeneity, panel Fixed Effects (FE) and Dynamic Panel with Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) were applied to link the drivers and the perception of corruption. The results are twofold: (i) on the one hand, the diachronic evolution of corruption, education index, economic performance or governance perceptions reveals different patterns for the countries of the Schengen zone; (ii) on the other hand, the composite index for education and governance assessment had a significant impact on corruption perceptions, while economic performance showed no apparent link to corruption. Incorporating the effects of economic and political shocks, the study will explore the resilience of the Schengen Zone's governance against corruption, particularly by examining the effectiveness of crisis management and education's role in reinforcing integrity. It will also conduct a longitudinal analysis to assess how these shocks influence corruption perceptions over time, offering insights into the adaptability of policy responses and their lasting impact on public trust. The findings establish new research pathways for academics and provide valuable incentives to policymakers and professional trainers to improve mechanisms for combating corruption.

This study focuses on the analysis of public opinion survey data on trust and participation in environmental movements fr om the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey, covering 88 countries and territories fr om 2017 onwards. Are we witnessing a greening of the Global South? Most of the existing, highly influential studies on this topic are based on earlier waves of the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey, with only a limited number of countries fr om the Global South covered in the surveys. Our multivariate analysis suggests that, in today's world, it is rather the Global South that is 'greening' and wh ere environmental movements enjoy the highest levels of participation and confidence. We also show that, holding human development indices constant, this greening of the Global South has overall positive effects on the socio-economic development of the countries concerned.

Proactive environmental strategy and performances of third party logistics providers (TPLs): Investigating the role of eco-control systems

In recent years, social protection reforms have gained significant traction, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. However, the dynamics shaping these reforms, including factors that influence public support or otherwise, remain relatively understudied. Focusing on Ghana, this book investigates the factors that influence citizen's support for two key social protection initiatives: the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme and the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Using data from an attitudinal survey, the author finds that economic self-interest, poverty attribution beliefs, institutional trust, and knowledge are key determinants of public support for the LEAP cash transfer programme. However, in the case of the NHIS, public support is predominantly shaped by poverty attribution beliefs, trust, and knowledge alone. Collectively, these findings emphasize the importance of programme-specific factors in shaping public attitudes towards social protection. They also underscore the need for targeted policy interventions, particularly efforts to strengthen institutional trust and improve citizen awareness of these initiatives, in order to foster broader and more sustained support for social protection policies and programmes in Ghana.

Economic performance, quality of democracy and satisfaction with democracy

Cloud computing and its impact on economic and environmental performance: A transaction cost economics perspective

This paper explores the relationship between perceptions of immigration and preferences for redistribution, using survey data from the European Social Survey. Some recent literature argues that hostility toward immigrants will reduce the preferred level of redistribution, primarily because people care about who they redistribute towards (the anti-solidarity hypothesis). Less attention has been paid to the possibility that immigration might be perceived as increasing the risk of income loss, something that should increase the preferred level of redistribution (the compensation hypothesis). This paper finds some evidence in favour of both hypotheses. Furthermore, the paper argues that anti-solidarity effects should be stronger in countries classified within the Social Democratic welfare state regime type and compensation effects should be stronger in countries within the Conservative welfare state regime type. There is some empirical support for this argument in the data.

ContextAgronomic surveys play a vital role in identifying on-farm yield constraints and opportunities to increase productivity, input-use efficiency, and farmer profit. These surveys typically rely on farmer-reported data, where crop yield and applied inputs per hectare are estimated based on farmer-reported total harvested output and applied inputs per field and associated field size. At question is how accurate field size is, which is vital in the case of smallholders as small inaccuracies can lead to large biases in estimated yield and inputs. ObjectivesThe goals of this study are to assess current approaches to determine field size in smallholders, analyze biases between measurements and farmer estimates, and their influence on the analysis of the survey data. Cost-effective approaches for accurate field size measurement are also discussed. MethodsWe reviewed published studies that used survey data collected from smallholders to determine the extent to which field size is independently validated by researchers. Subsequently, we used data from thousands of smallholder fields in Southeast Asia to compare farmer-reported versus measured field size and examined the associated impact on estimated yields, inputs, and their relationships. ResultsWe found that most published studies using survey data did not validate field size reported by farmers. Furthermore, our analysis of the field size data from smallholders in Southeast Asia showed substantial differences between farmer-reported and measured field size, resulting in significant biases in estimated yield and applied inputs, and leading to spurious relationships between them. ConclusionUncertainty in field size can mislead analysis of smallholder survey data. ImplicationsFuture studies relying on survey data from smallholders should incorporate measurements of field size for accurate determination of crop yield and inputs.

The apparent triumph of democracy in Europe after 1989 was as exhilarating as it was unanticipated. A method of government that in the 1930s had seemed doomed to extinction had, by the end of the century, come to be seen as normative. In contrast to the 1930s, moreover, this modern democracy was now intimately associated with political stability and economic prosperity. Despite this late twentieth-century apotheosis of ‘democracy’, however, it is easy to forget that democracy had not only been made to work, but that it had also been tamed. Events since 1989 suggest that what Charles Maier has termed the struggle since the French Revolution to make democracy ‘safe for the world’1 had finally been won. Maier’s comment is an apt reminder of the importance of locating the ‘democracy’ of the late twentieth century within a proper historical context, and that conceptions of democracy cannot be taken as timeless or unchanging. The democracy that appeared to fail in the interwar years was not, therefore, necessarily the same as that which succeeded after 1945. Likewise, the triumph of a particular conception of democracy in the late twentieth century represented the failure not only of the alternatives to democracy, but also of alternative forms of democracy. The study of democracy in twentieth-century Europe has been dominated to a remarkable degree both by political scientists and by methodologies derived from political science. In particular, there has been a flowering of interest since the mid-1970s in processes of change from democratic to authoritarian regimes and, now overwhelmingly, from authoritarian regimes to democracies. These ‘transitions’ have been assiduously tracked, recorded, compared and contrasted by scholars such as Juan P. Linz, Alfred Stepan and Samuel P. Huntington. An entire sub-discipline Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway

AI technology is increasingly being explored as a strategic tool for enhancing security. However, concerns surrounding privacy infringement and inherent biases in such technologies have raised significant challenges to their widespread acceptance. Real-time facial recognition and object recognition systems, in particular, necessitate public empathy and support to function effectively. Police legitimacy and procedural justice have emerged as critical mechanisms for fostering public trust and cooperation in law enforcement activities. Understanding the role of police legitimacy in shaping public acceptance of AI-driven strategies like AI CCTV is crucial in the context of public security. This study, grounded in Tyler's procedural justice theory, sought to examine the influence of perceptions of police legitimacy on citizens' willingness to accept AI CCTV and their readiness to share personal information. A survey of 1,101 general citizens was conducted to explore these dynamics. The findings confirmed procedural fairness as a key factor, as argued by Tyler. Procedural fairness positively influenced the acceptance of AI CCTV through its indirect effects on compliance obligations, trust in the police, and a willingness to provide personal information. Furthermore, police effectiveness was shown to have a positive indirect impact on AI CCTV acceptance, mediated through trust in the police and willingness to share information. In contrast, distributive fairness did not significantly affect citizen cooperation and was found to negatively influence the acceptance of AI technology. This negative association may reflect a tendency to view technological solutions as alternatives to address perceived shortcomings in police performance. These findings underscore the importance of procedural justice in shaping public attitudes toward AI-based security measures. The research offers meaningful insights for law enforcement agencies in formulating effective security strategies that incorporate AI CCTV. It also provides a foundation for developing targeted approaches to achieve public consensus and support. Policymakers can utilize these results as evidence to guide the creation of security policies that balance technological innovation with public trust, ensuring the legitimacy and fairness of AI-driven solutions in public security contexts.