The Ideological Shadow of Authoritarianism

"How are left-right schemas formed in new democracies? Most of the literature either assumes that a common understanding of ideology is readily available to new democracies or points to variation in the dominance of different social cleavages. We propose an alternative theory, which focuses on the legacy of the authoritarian past. Dictatorships are not ideologically neutral. They are linked either to left or to the right. Neither are they positively evaluated by most citizens and political elites after the democratic transition. Combining these two observations, we derive a model of ideological learning. In its purest form, the model suggests that when the authoritarian regime is linked to the left (right), the consequent democratic regime will be characterised by an anti-left (anti-right) bias. We test our hypothesis with a new individual-level repeated cross-sectional dataset that covers all Latin American and European new democracies. We find significant ideological bias, which tends to evaporate over time and as the political system consolidates. We also show that the strength and durability of ideological bias is mediated by the indoctrination capacities of the previous regime.”