Role of Ideological Legitimation on the Stability of Authoritarian Regimes: A Quantitative Examination

It is empirically well established that modern authoritarian regimes cannot survive by giving material benefits to the elite of the ruling circle and repressing dissidents alone; they also need to develop "legitimation strategies," discourses, and policies that show their competence to rule to the broader public. The empirical literature provides strong evidence for the causal effects of economic and institutional strategies authoritarian regimes use to increase their legitimacy. However, the causal effect of "ideological legitimation", a set of ideas political elites use to justify their rule, on authoritarian regimes remains ambiguous in the literature. Specifically, the literature only focuses on closed authoritarian regimes with no multiparty competition when analysing the impact of regime ideology on authoritarian stability. Even in those examinations, the literature does not consider the issue of endogeneity and reverse causality between authoritarian stability and the development of an ideological narrative. Recognizing the causal effect of ideological legitimation on authoritarian regimes as an empirical gap, I try to understand whether regimes that use ideological legitimation strategies to higher degrees are more likely to survive. In the analysis, I combine data from regime legitimation strategies data of Varieties of Democracy Institute with original coding of authoritarian regime country-years (1991-2020). To test the proposed relationship, I use large-n macro-level comparison and fit a multivariate random-effects logistic regression model to account for country-level heterogeneity in the data. Furthermore, recognizing the endogenous nature of ideological legitimation to authoritarian stability, I use instrumental variable estimation techniques to "randomize" the degree of ideology. Being inspired by previous studies that show a relationship between colonial history and "exclusionary ideologies", I use the length of colonial or patrimonial rule in a country to instrument for the degree of ideological legitimation. My findings suggest that while the degree of ideological legitimation has a significant, positive effect on authoritarian stability, this effect is smaller when instrumental variable techniques are used. Overall, my study consolidates the role of ideology on authoritarian regimes' stability while also emphasizing that its effect should not be overestimated. These findings imply that the ideological claims of authoritarian regimes should not be treated as cheap talk, and they should be taken seriously. I conclude the paper by suggesting further guidelines for studying ideologies in authoritarian regime context