Legitimacy Beyond the Democratic Context: Explaining Political Support in Autocracies

• In Event: Understanding Authoritarianism - I

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, and thus at the height of the third wave of democratisation, there was a veritable "democratic euphoria" due to the democratisation processes that had begun in the post-Soviet states, which manifested itself in academia through an image of almost imperative democratisation (Pickel 2016, p. 288). In the period that followed, this initial euphoria was increasingly overtaken by reality: Not only did the democratisation processes that had begun in the meantime, failed, but there is also a progressive erosion or even hybridisation of democracy in consolidated democracies (e.g. Inglehart 2018; Smolka 2019; Stasavage 2020; Haggard and Kaufman 2021; Pfeifer 2022). In addition, authoritarian regimes such as China or Russia appear to be extremely resilient, even though they were considered "outdated models" at the height of the third wave of democratization.
However, despite their widespread prevalence and persistence, authoritarian systems outside of the analysis of democratisation processes only seem to have gradually moved into the interest of comparative political science in recent years, which has fuelled a debate about a "democracy bias": The core of this criticism is that due to the reference point of democracy a bias in research with regard to political system types is recognisable. Yet this neglect does not only apply to the structural level of autocracies: the aspect of the legitimacy of autocratic regimes and thus also the level of political culture were also neglected for a long time, partly because a general illegitimacy of authoritarian rule was assumed. However, even if it seems indisputable that authoritarian systems require a certain degree of consent within society, interest in this corresponding relationship between system and its citizens in authoritarian contexts is only gradually becoming the focus of comparative political science (e.g. Pickel and Stark 2010; Breustedt and Stark 2015; Mauk 2017, 2020)
This paper focuses on conceptualising political support in the context of autocracies. It explores individuals' political attitudes and value orientations towards the political system. The paper addresses three key questions: How is the concept of political support currently applied in non-democratic contexts? What adaptations are necessary for an adequate conceptualisation of political support in an authoritarian context? What determines individuals' attitudes towards the political system in an authoritarian context? This article also reviews current methods for the measurement of political support in authoritarian contexts. By examining theoretical and conceptual factors

Author

• Dennis Kurrek, University of Hagen