Risk Attitudes and Political Participation under Authoritarian Rule

• In Event: Comparative Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

In nondemocracies, such varied political acts as protest participation, voting for the opposition, and abstaining from supporting regime candidates entail risks. Yet risk attitudes have seldom been studied directly in authoritarian settings. This paper investigates how citizens’ attitudes toward risk shape political participation under authoritarian rule; it proposes a theory of how affective and relational factors interact with an individual’s baseline tolerance for risk to explain risky political behavior—even when the strong organizational ties emphasized by exiting literature on high-risk participation are absent. Empirically, I test this argument using survey data from Russia on (1) non-voting; (2) opposition voting; and (3) an individual's likelihood of misrepresenting their voting behavior when queried directly (i.e., of falsifying their preferences). This paper is the first to benchmark the predictive power of risk attitudes relative to other known determinates of turnout, voting, and preference falsification. It also contributes to our understanding of how ordinary citizens overcome a baseline aversion to political risk-taking.

Author

• Bryn Rosenfeld, Cornell University