Who Is Open to Authoritarian Governance within Western Democracies?

Abstract

Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind, we explored which ideological groups are most open to authoritarian governance within Western general publics using World Values Survey data from fourteen Western democracies and three recent Latin American Public Opinion Project samples from Canada and the United States. Two key findings emerged. First, cultural conservatism was consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance. Second, within half of the democracies studied, including all of the English-speaking ones, Western citizens holding a protection-based attitude package⸺combining cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes⸺were the most open to authoritarian governance. Within other countries, protection-based and consistently right-wing attitude packages were associated with similarly high levels of openness to authoritarian governance. We discuss implications for radical right populism and the possibility of splitting potentially undemocratic mass coalitions along economic lines.

Is the Myth of Left-Wing Authoritarianism Itself a Myth?

“…For reasons outlined by other researchers (Jost et al, 2003;Malka et al, 2020) and consistent with prior data (Sprong et al, 2019), we expected that of the World Values Survey. However, not only does their study specifically only focus on a region of the world where one would expect LWA to be lowest (Western democracies) and thus does not advance our knowledge very far beyond WEIRD samples, their measurement of authoritarianism was poor on multiple levels.…”

“…This authoritarianism measure was completed in Wave 6 of the World Values Survey (WVS; Inglehart et al, 2014). Specifically, over 66,000 participants across 54 nations completed a standard Political identification (left-right) item (e.g., Jost et al, 2003;Sprong et al, 2019;Nilsson & Jost, 2020) and a standard Authoritarian Governance endorsement questionnaire (e.g., Ariely & Davidov, 2010;Miller, 2017;Malka, Lelkes, Bakker, & Spivack, 2020). The political identification item allows participants to self-identify on the left or right, offering no direct method overlap with authoritarianism.…”

“…Authoritarianism. Participants completed a three-item measure of endorsement of Authoritarian Governance that has been used in prior research to measure authoritarianism (e.g., Ariely & Davidov, 2010;Miller, 2017;Malka et al, 2020). These items ask participants the degree that they value "Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections," "Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country," and "Having the army rule."…”

“…These items ask participants the degree that they value "Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections," "Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country," and "Having the army rule." The items were on a scale from 1-4 where 1 = more agreement; as a result, we reversed-scored them and averaged them into a single Authoritarianism measure in a manner identical to prior research (e.g., Ariely & Davidov, 2010;Miller, 2017;Malka et al, 2020). (Participants who responded with answers not placing themselves on the continuum were dropped).…”

“…13 Western Democracies Versus Eastern Europe. To evaluate cross-cultural differences, we further compared the ideology-authoritarianism relationship across available Western democracies (defined in the typical manner as the EU15 plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States; see Malka et al, 2020) and a region long influenced by more authoritarian left-wing ideology: Eastern Europe (see INSOL, 2020) and/or the former Soviet Republics (taken together, in our sample this list includes Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Kosovo, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine).…”