Scientific knowledge and sector expertise is the backbone good policy, which can yield good governance outcomes. Nevertheless, very little is known about citizen views of experts and expertise in political decision-making. Do citizens welcome experts? Do certain policy issues boost citizens' approval for expert involvement? And what precise role do citizens envision for experts in the policy-making and decision-making processes? The paper addresses these questions using a novel battery of survey data and a conjoint experiment about expert involvement in politics. It finds that independent experts are preferred relative to elected politicians in the designing and implementation phases of policy-making. For the decision-making stage, decisions made directly by the citizens through referenda is preferred, but the elected representatives and independent experts are evaluated equally and this holds for a variety of technically complex and social issues. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the current role of representatives in democracies and the demands for more technocratic and participatory processes.