Abstract
Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.
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Notes
In this context, “societal” should not be confused with “perceived (social) threat” arguments from authoritarianism scholars in political psychology (e.g. Stenner 2005), which focus more on perceived threats to social values (e.g. homosexuals, immigrants).
Bermeo (2003) offers a dissent from this perspective by arguing that ordinary citizens played, at the most, a peripheral role in democratic breakdowns in inter-war Europe. While an important insight, her analysis relies on the negligible distribution of votes for anti democratic parties even when widespread anti-democratic sentiment was evident.
The emancipative values and traditional values share a few indicators (e.g. the justifiability of abortion and two elements of the four-item child autonomy index). However, the correlation between both variables is modest (r = −0.480), which suggests both variables capture different concepts of “emancipative” values and “traditional” values. The appendix contains a full correlation matrix.
The appendix has a model in which the democratic stock measure is condensed to deciles and treated as a random effect. The caterpillar plots for this random effect do well to illustrate the heterogeneity among these countries and the attitudes of their citizens toward autocratic governance.
The appendix shows the other peculiar effects that this emancipative values measure has on some of the other parameters in the model.
The appendix contains additional models that unpack the heterogeneity in attitudes toward autocracy as a function of social class.
Three micro-level control variables are binary, for which I use the median. This means the comparison is a working woman without a college education with the average age, socioeconomic conditions, political attitudes and values, and under the average territorial threat and regime type.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Damarys Canache, K. Amber Curtis, Kelly Senters, and the three anonymous reviewers and editor at Political Behavior for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Replication files are available on the author’s Github account (github.com/svmiller).
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Miller, S.V. Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems. Polit Behav 39, 457–478 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9363-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9363-7