Do Elections Change Political Attitudes in Autocracies?: Identification through the Staggered Introduction of Local Elections in Kazakhstan

• In Event: Repression from above and Legitimacy to below: Subnational Elites and Authoritarian Politics in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia

Abstract

Scholars have studied authoritarian elections primarily from the dictators' perspective: Competitive elections help autocrats to improve governance by grasping grass-roots popular preferences. However, how competitive elections alter the public's views on the regime is underexplored, despite the fact that popular perceptions serve as micro foundations of such information mechanisms. To fill this gap, we conduct a survey in Kazakhstan to examine the impact of local elections on citizens' attitudes toward local elites and politics. We exploit the staggered introduction of local multi-candidate elections due to past turnovers of appointed village chiefs for causal identification, utilizing the item count technique, conjoint analysis, and anchoring vignettes for measuring political attitudes accurately in autocratic contexts. We find that those who have experienced their first-ever election express higher levels of political efficacy but report more frequent experiences of bribing local officials. Also, our conjoint experiment suggests that people do neither punish or reward their village leaders' policy responsiveness even after experiencing the first multi-candidate election. The overall results indicate that local multi-candidate elections in autocracies may make citizens think that their voice is heard but do not necessarily change popular evaluations of their leaders and even induce negative sentiments toward the quality of government.

Author

• Masaaki Higashijima, U of Tokyo (Japan)