Who Do People Prefer to Be in Charge? An In-Depth Analysis of UK Citizens’ Preferences for Politicians, Citizens, Experts, and/or Artificial Intelligence in Policymaking

For a long time, research on democratic governance has primarily focused on preferences for singular decision-makers: elected politicians, citizens, or experts. Recently, however, there has been a shift toward considering preferences for multiple decision-makers, but the specifics of these “multi-actor” models remain unclear. This study addresses this gap by exploring how people prefer decisional authority to be balanced among elected politicians, citizens, (human) experts, and artificial intelligence-based technologies. Analyzing data from over 1500 UK citizens, we identified eight distinct clusters. Four of these clusters (30.8% of the sample) prefer one actor to be dominant in policy decisions (“dominant-actor” clusters), while the other four clusters (69.2% of the sample) prefer co-decision by two or more actors (“multiple-actor” clusters). Overall, the present findings highlight the complexity of decision-making preferences in democratic governance, revealing a strong tendency among citizens toward more “hybrid” decision-making models.