This paper investigates technocratic attitudes among citizens in 17 polities worldwide, alongside populist attitudes, as they challenge fundamental principles of representative democracy. It expands to non-European and non-Western settings the insights gained by the analysis of nine European countries in Bertsou and Caramani (2020). By applying a Most Different Systems Design, the question this paper asks is to what extent the results found for Europe apply globally. The investigation of the same nine European countries, plus Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, and the US is based on the same battery of technocratic attitudes. Relying on data from a new survey with a sample of about 17,000 respondents fielded online between 2020 and 2021, the paper performs principal component analysis (PCA), latent class analysis (LCA), as well as logistic regression analysis to estimate the assignment of respondents to either a technocratic, populist or party-democratic class based on education, trust, left−right among other factors. The analysis aims at finding out if the dimensions of expertise, anti-politics and elitism that structure technocratic attitudes, their partial overlap with populist attitudes, and the size of citizens’ classes holding such attitudes, are valid also in radically different cultural, socio-economic and regime contexts. Ultimately, the question the paper poses concerns the validity of fundamental political attitudes toward representation cutting across global regions or, conversely, their variation across global territorial cleavages. MDSD provides the possibility to identify either common factors accounting for the presence of similar sets of attitudes worldwide or sources of variation between regions.