Who Wants Discretion? Public Perspectives on Trust, Regulation, and Power Dynamics

The rise of populism raises critical questions about the distribution and extent of power, especially as modern democracies tend to delegate decision-making to bureaucrats through regulations and grant judicial power to judges, rather than relying solely on politicians through legislation or executive decisions. However, public preferences regarding this discretion—its scope, extent, and form—and to whom it is granted remain underexplored. In this research, we investigate whether citizens support discretion, to whom (politicians, bureaucrats, and judges), and key types of discretion designs—ex-ante (e.g., micromanagement in legislation) and ex-post (e.g., political versus non-political appointments, veto players). Theoretically, we argue that understanding these preferences requires considering trust in decision-making actors and general attitudes toward regulation. We conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample in Britain. These findings offer important insights into the evolving structure of democratic governance and contribute to ongoing debates about the distribution of power in modern democracies.