Deprivation, Public Discontent and Support for Authoritarian Policies

Democracies increasingly employ authoritarian policies against vulnerable groups with substantial public support. We test why, in a pre-registered conjoint experiment in Germany (N = 3,165) where respondents chose repeatedly between hypothetical surveillance systems that varied in whom they monitor and in the procedural safeguards attached. A structural deep-learning estimator recovers each respondent's utility for every design feature. Deprivation and zero-sum thinking, which we expected to sharpen target selection, instead raise support for surveillance of everyone, an indiscriminate authoritarianism. Prescriptive meritocratic beliefs, the conviction that effort should determine economic outcomes, produce selective authoritarianism instead, directing surveillance at welfare recipients and immigrants independent of economic position. Deprivation and zero-sum thinking thus set the level of surveillance a respondent accepts, while meritocratic beliefs set its direction.