The Political Culture of Authoritarian Regimes

The expectation that authoritarian regimes can have a “legacy” effect on political culture in newly established democracies seems plausible, but it does rely heavily on a central assumption: That political cultures in authoritarian regimes actually differ from political cultures in democratic regimes. This assumption, however, has not yet received much empirical substantiation. Only little research exists on political culture in authoritarian regimes, and systematic comparisons between democratic and authoritarian regimes are even rarer. The few studies that do exist (Dalton/Ong 2006; Park/Chang 2013; Welzel/Dalton 2016) mainly concentrate on a single world region: East Asia, making generalizations problematic. Moreover, whether political cultures vary within the authoritarian regimes category, i.e. between different types of authoritarian regimes (electoral authoritarian regimes, monarchies, strongman regimes, military regimes, one-party regimes…) remains an even more open question. In order to shed light on these questions, the contribution compares the political cultures in democratic and authoritarian regimes, and between different types of authoritarian regimes. More specifically, it examines whether citizens in democracies are more supportive of the idea of democracy, more strongly committed to core democratic values such as political equality or political pluralism, and more strongly opposed to the idea of authoritarian rule than individuals living under authoritarian rule. The analysis combines public opinion data from various sources (Afrobarometer, AmericasBarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, Latinobarómetro, World Values Survey) and uses multi-level modeling in order to create a comprehensive global picture of political culture(s) in democratic and various forms of authoritarian regimes and to isolate the effect the type of political regime has on people’s attitudes.