Unpacking Authoritarian Legitimation Strategies: Findings from a New Expert Survey

Extant research has struggled to systematically capture and compare the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. In contrast to existing analyses, which predominantly focus on the acceptance of government legitimation strategies, we argue that claims to legitimacy fundamentally influence structures of domination and dissent in authoritarian regimes. We present a new dataset on legitimation strategies of non-democratic regimes that is based on the assessment of leading country experts for 98 states from 1991 to 2010. We analyze six conceptually distinguishable but interlinked legitimation strategies, namely (1) foundational myth, (2) ideology, (3) personalism, (4) international engagement, (5) procedural mechanisms and (6) performance. Based on the expert assessments, we establish four legitimation profiles, which systematically confirm previous anecdotal evidence that authoritarian regimes regularly combine numerous legitimation dimensions to justify their rule. Initial results show that coherent claims to legitimacy positively affect an authoritarian regime’s persistence.