Regime Legitimacy and Its Sources in Democracies and Autocracies

• In Event: Building State Legitimacy

Abstract

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the globe has seen the proliferation of new forms of autocratic rule. While the world’s non-democracies today may differ starkly from each other in many respects, they all share one common characteristic: a lack of democratic legitimation. In theory, this lack of democratic legitimation should prove problematic for the empirical legitimacy of autocratic regimes, making them prone to popular uprisings that threaten their stability. However, many autocracies have proven to be remarkably resilient and stable, indicating that they do in fact manage to generate legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens. But is this really the case? Are non-democratic forms of rule actually supported by majorities of the citizenry? Are they maybe even more popular than their democratic counterparts?
And how can autocratic regimes manage to generate legitimacy without democratic legitimation? Is popular support for the political system dependent on the same factors in both democratic and autocratic regimes or do specific sets of determinants contribute to the formation of political support in each type of political regime? For example, do autocracies rely more heavily on economic performance than democracies? Can democracies rely solely on their superior record in guaranteeing political rights and civil liberties? How can autocracies compensate their lack of democratic performance? What role do traditional values play in either type of political regime?
This contribution seeks to answer these questions by developing a comprehensive theoretical framework and empirically analyzing a newly constructed dataset based on a diverse body of survey (World Values Survey, Afrobarometer, AmericasBarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, Latinobarometro) and aggregate (Varieties of Democracy Data, World Development Indicators, Human Development Data, Quality of Government Data) data for 87 democratic and non-democratic political systems on a global scale. It both systematically compares the amount of popular support that democracies and autocracies receive as well as uses advanced multilevel modeling techniques to examine the micro- and macro-level sources this support is based upon.

Author

• Marlene Mauk, Mainz University