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Western publics show a sizable support for experts’ involvement in political decision making, that is, technocratic attitudes. This article analyzes two key aspects of these attitudes: technocratic attitudes’ stability and the heterogeneity in the demand for experts depending on the context. We first analyze how technocratic attitudes have been affected by an external event, the COVID‐19 pandemic, that has placed experts’ role at the forefront of the public debate; this allows us to analyze the stability or change in these attitudes. Second, given that the pandemic quickly evolved from being a public health issue to becoming a political issue combining economic and public health dimensions, we examine whether framing the COVID‐19 pandemic exclusively as a public health problem or as including a prominent economic dimension as well affects the type of public officials who are preferred to lead the political …