Authoritarian Predispositions and Attitudes toward Democracy in Western Europe

• In Event: Parties, Populism, and Politics

Abstract

Authoritarianism, defined as an individual-level predisposition that favors conformity over autonomy, is central to understanding a wide range of mass attitudes and preferences. It is implicit in the authoritarianism literature that authoritarian citizens reject democracy altogether and therefore pose a threat to (liberal) democratic systems. In examining this relationship, past work has tended to (1) focus on authoritarianism as an attitude, and (2) pose a dichotomous question, is authoritarianism associated with a rejection of democracy or not? Here, I diverge from this approach and argue that democracy should be understood as a multi-dimensional concept. Using World Values Survey data, I examine the individual-level relationship between authoritarianism as a predisposition and citizens’ attitudes toward democracy’s different dimensions. In doing so, I not only look at how authoritarian predispositions relate to support for democracy but also examine what authoritarians understand by democracy.

Author

• Patricia Rehus, University of Surrey