Political Monopoly and Support for Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: Political Trust and Tolerance

Abstract

Contrary to popular conceptions that high approval ratings of authoritarian regimes are driven by preference falsification, recent work has shown that many of them, including Putin’s, reflect a real preference (e.g. Frye et al 2017). These findings have led to new theorizing to explain why authoritarian citizens support their regimes, with explanations ranging from political socialization (Greene and Robertson 2019) to affective memory association (Truex and Tavana 2019). While most if not all of these mechanisms are likely operant depending on the context, I argue that there is an additional cognitive explanation essential to the maintenance of authoritarian popularity: political monopoly. They are popular because they are the only game in town. Political monopoly is traditionally cited as a means of ensuring incumbent success in elections (Magaloni 2006) and avoiding organized attempts to remove them from power (Svolik 2012), but little is understood about how the decision to limit the ability of the opposition to compete for power effects the attitudes of authoritarian citizens. Drawing on theory from the cognitive psychology of choice and decision making, I argue that the cultivation of political monopoly has a direct and essential effect on sustaining approval of authoritarian regimes. I test this theory using two online survey experiments in which respondents are introduced to an election scenario using fictional media headlines and are then asked to make subjective evaluations about the incumbent. The pilot experiment is carried out in the U.K. and seeks to establish the direct relationship between levels of political competition and subjective evaluations of an incumbent while testing several proposed mechanisms. The second is carried out in Russia both to test the theory in an authoritarian context and to test additional cognitive mechanisms.

Author

• Jacob Tucker, Princeton University