A Rise of Support for Authoritarian Alternatives to Democracy in the West

• In Event: Do Citizens in Democracies Still Support Democracy?

Abstract

Recent developments such as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, growing support for authoritarian candidates, and surging popularity of far-right, anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe and North America have all caught the academia by surprise. These developments gave rise to new literature that attempts to explain their driving factors (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Mounk 2018; Runciman 2018). However, a majority of studies in this emerging literature focus on factors influencing the electoral performances of relevant actors and the voting patterns (MacWilliams 2016; van der Bles, Postmes, LeKander‐Kanis, and Otjes 2018; Cornelis and Van Hiel 2015; Colantone and Stanig 2018; Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018; Luttig, Federico, and Lavine 2017). Given the complexity of various factors that influence electoral processes, it is difficult to capture the authoritarian shift in these societies by looking only at the electoral success of these actors. In addition, exclusive emphasis on electoral processes largely results in the neglect of deeper sociological changes which preceded the emergence of these authoritarian actors. Hence, we propose shifting the locus of attention to a broader measure of attitudes towards authoritarian regime types, such as dictatorship, technocracy, and military rule, as good ways to govern. Despite arguments about the stability of Western democracies, we find a surprising degree of sympathy towards authoritarian regime alternatives in the West. In this paper, we argue that the rise of this sympathy is associated with factors such as anti-immigrant attitudes, security threat perception, economic insecurity, and economic nationalism. These factors increase the legitimacy of authoritarian regime alternatives in the eyes of the public in Western societies. In our cross-national study, we seek to demonstrate this connection in Western Europe and North America by using ordinal probit model on data from the 6th wave (2010-2014) of the World Values Survey (WVS). We also use the previous waves of WVS to observe the changes over the last few decades. The preliminary results show that the sympathy towards authoritarian alternatives are associated with the dissatisfaction of some social groups with the changes in their country and their fear of a collapse of the normative order in which they have enjoyed a higher social status.

Authors

• Fatih Umit Cetin, Umass Amherst

• Burak Demir, University of Tennessee, Knoxville