Deciding Who Decides: Trust and Support for Elected Official, Expert, and Citizen Decision-Making Regarding Nuclear Waste Management

Many policy issues, such as nuclear waste management, are complex and require expertise to address. In many such policy areas, decisions are made by elected officials with input largely from experts and not the public or other stakeholders. However, such top-down approaches can create mistrust and political opposition. In the case of nuclear waste management in the United States, the selection of a single waste repository (Yucca Mountain in Nevada) by Congress led to strong opposition, stagnation, and an eventual call for a participatory, consent-based siting approach to determine the location for a nuclear waste repository. While consent-based siting is appealing, it is not clear if the public, broadly speaking, would support a participatory approach or an expert-driven approach regarding nuclear waste management. In this paper, we examine public trust and public preferences for policy influence among elected officials, experts, and citizens. Specifically, we develop and test a theoretical framework that posits that the various cultural worldviews—hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism—shape trust in policy actors and that cultural worldviews and trust shape which policy actors the public believes should influence nuclear waste policymaking. Overall, we find the public trusts citizens and experts more than the government and elected officials. Additionally, we find that the public thinks experts should have more influence on nuclear waste policy than citizens or elected officials. Finally, regarding cultural worldviews, hierarchs tended to trust experts and elected officials and support their influence, whereas egalitarians tended to trust citizens and support their influence.