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In this article, it is shown that citizen process preferences are complex and include several dimensions. The argument relies on data from a representative sample of Spanish citizens (N = 2,450) to assess these dimensions. Using confirmatory factor analysis as well as Mokken analysis, it is shown that citizen process preferences capture support for three different models: participatory, representative and expert-based. The relationships between these dimensions (where the opposition between representation and participation stands as the clearest result) and the substantive and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.

AbstractDo citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand expert involvement in political decision‐making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non‐transparent nature of expert‐based governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across 'hard' and 'easy' political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians.

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of emphasis framing effects is tested for and their determinants are identified outside of the controlled settings of laboratories. Nonetheless, the analyzed setting allows for considerably more control than usually available in the field: All party, government and interest group recommendations were symmetric for both initiatives, and the simultaneous vote rules out potential variation of individual preferences and compositional changes of the electorate over time. Using community and individual level data it is shown that the difference in approval rates is largely due to the different emphases in the initiatives' titles.

Introduction. - Early Days. - The 'Wall-to-Wall' Coalition. - 'I don't know, I am looking for someone who does!'. - The Best Man in the Government. - Golda's Kitchenette. - The Grand Debate. - Hand Picked. - Submission to Gush Emunim. - Conclusion. - Epilogue

"'Scientific advice to politics', the 'nature of expertise', and the 'relation between experts, policy makers, and the public' are variations of a topic that currently attracts the attention of social scientists, philosophers of science as well as practitioners in the public sphere and the media. This renewed interest in a persistent theme is initiated by the call for a democratization of expertise that has become the order of the day in the legitimation of research funding. The new significance of 'participation' and 'accountability' has motivated scholars to take a new look at the science - politics interface and to probe questions such as ""What is new in the arrangement of scientific expertise and political decision-making?"", ""How can reliable knowledge be made useful for politics and society at large, and how can epistemically and ethically sound decisions be achieved without losing democratic legitimacy?"", ""How can the objective of democratization of expertise be achieved without compromising the quality and reliability of knowledge?"" Scientific knowledge and the 'experts' that represent it no longer command the unquestioned authority and public trust that was once bestowed upon them, and yet, policy makers are more dependent on them than ever before. This collection of essays explores the relations between science and politics with the instruments of the social studies of science, thereby providing new insights into their re-alignment under a new régime of governance."

This study was designed to assess the relative importance of conflicting interests and ideologies as determinants of conflict resolution. The conflict was defined in the context of a simulation of political decision-making. Decision-makers had different preferences for the allocation
of resources to alternative programs. Six male and six female dyads were run in each cell of a design that made size of conflicting interests orthogonal to amount of ideological dissensus. A significant main effect for conflict of interest was attained on each measure of negotiating behavior.
High conflict of interest dyads took longer to negotiate, allocated less funds, produced more asymmetrical out comes, and had more unresolved conflicts than low conflict of interest dyads. Perceptions of the situation corresponded to negotiating behavior. High conflict dyads viewed the negotiation
more like a "win-lose" competition, were less willing to compromise, regarded compromise as being more like defeat, and so on. The amount of variance accounted for by the ideology and sex variables was negligible on most of the behavioral and perceptual indices. The implications
of these results were discussed in terms of a weighting that is affected by aspects of the conflict situation.