The Enigmatic Appeal: Exploring Public Support for Autocratic Leaders
In modern times, autocratic leaders around the world have learned their lessons to prolong their hold on power (Gandhi and Przeworski, 2007). They demonstrated remarkable capacity in adopting sophisticated tactics to survive. China’s use of facial recognition technology to monitor its population or Russia’s information manipulation strategies worked well over the years in shaping public perception domestically. As such, while the autocrats’ goal to keep power remained unchanged, they found ways to cover their true intentions to win public legitimacy and support. To note, this is, however, similar to extremist right-wing leaders in democratic contexts who via a combination of tactics such as populism or voter preference manipulations attempt to adjust public sentiment in their favor (McKay, 2020; Dai and Kustov, 2022). Yet, in one way or another, it remains unclear and even puzzling why people sacrifice their preferences for democracy and freedoms, as well as why they find appeal in autocratic governance, which is most often conservatively brutal, corrupt, and excessively controlling. To answer this question, after briefly exploring the literature, I develop my argument within the context of authoritarian countries where autocrats often embody the characteristics and mechanisms of undemocratic regimes.
The existing scholarship provides some explanations for why the public may favor autocratic leaders. For instance, Hajnal (2024) argues that Hungarian President Victor Orban, who has been deteriorating the rule of law and democratic institutions since 2010, enjoyed political support by shaping public discourse and perception about economic performance and conservative beliefs. This demonstrates that by utilizing influence through the power of attractive rhetoric relating to confirmation bias, leaders with autocratic tendencies develop invisible mechanisms controlling public behavior. Guriev and Treisman (2020: 3), on the other hand, note that depending on the authoritarian regime type, autocrats maintain their survival using more nuanced informational mechanisms. For example, as authors note, in overt dictatorships such as North Korea, Syria, or Turkmenistan leaders use indoctrination that justifies the leader’s violence, while in informational autocracies, such as Russia or Peru, they deploy manipulative tactics to unobtrusively impose favorable agenda that benefits their regime. As such, the presence of these regulatory mechanisms causes people to accept the conditions they would otherwise resist (namely such as limited freedom of speech or surveillance) through discursive normalization of the oppressive practices.
Some other scholars have emphasized that the public perception of an autocrat’s popularity impacts the support for them (Buckley et al., 2024), as well as a deeply polarized society such as in Turkey or Brazil makes it much easier to influence the minds of followers (Larres, 2022). However, I suggest considering two tactics that autocrats employ to increase their public support which appear to be overlooked in both recent and past works. They are (i) the cultivation of resistance to democracy; and (ii) the illusion of substantial improvements that together may partially explain people’s preference for undemocratic leaders.
On the one hand, by ‘cultivation of resistance to democracy’ I mean deliberate efforts by autocrats to grow people’s resistance toward democratic principles by isolating the public from democratic influence while denigrating its value. In the literature, it is often assumed that the people in autocratic societies desire democratic freedoms. However, I would argue that this assumption is simply wrong. For people living in autocracies with hard restrictions and control, it is much more probable that a lack of exposure to democratic institutions deprives the understanding of their benefits. This insulation makes it impossible to see how freedom looks like in practice which allows autocrats to demonize its true meaning thereby manipulating the democratically inexperienced populace and fostering skepticism among it. An illustrative example is the interview with one defecting North Korean respondent who said: “Before we left North Korea, our team was warned not to be swayed by the capitalism we would see in the outside world. And we were told specifically not to meet or talk with South Korean students at the contest.”
Another example is the answer of an Afghani respondent in the interview with The Wilson Quarterly who stated: “At school, however, some of my teachers said that democracy is a bad word and that anybody who likes democracy is against Allah.” Hence, as evident, nurturing a negative attitude toward democracy is a deliberate strategy deployed by autocratic regimes directed at shaping people’s beliefs.
On the other hand, autocrats deploy the ‘illusion of substantial improvements’ tactic, by which I mean the situation when autocrats deliberately create the image of positive changes by providing some stimulus to society (such as opening the economy for foreign investments or providing social services as well as symbolic voting rights and governance reforms) without incurring significant losses for their regime. This, as such, fosters public support for the leaders due to public perception of selective positive change which is contrasted by the earlier restricted conditions. Such a tactic, despite being beneficial for the autocrats, has a detrimental long-term impact on the fabric of society that is blinded by the façade of the illusive progress because it in fact preserves the oppressive status quo. For example, over 90% of youth between 18 and 24 in Saudi Arabia in 2017 were very supportive of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership because he provided incremental stimulus to the people by removing some insignificant conservative restrictions by allowing women to drive the car or introducing movie theaters and musical concerts. Another example is Turkey where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2017 conducted constitutional reforms ostensibly to modernize the political system, while in fact consolidating its authority and diminishing the checks and balances system. As demonstrated, in this way, using the limited concessions autocrats learned to escape genuine accountability and perpetuate their rule.
The two tactics presented above may be deployed in various forms. They can be used separately at different times, deployed in combination, or they can supplement additional practices. The truth is, however, that the arsenal of autocratic tactics to maintain a hold on power appears to be diverse. And it is likely to expand in the future as long as autocrats learn to adapt. At the same time, this means that the sophistication of survival mechanisms deployed by autocrats will likely impact people’s support for them since such mechanisms efficiently mask the detrimental effect of their rule.
Given the growing arsenal of autocratic survival mechanisms, this work sought to identify two nuanced yet often overlooked practices: (i) ‘cultivation of resistance to democracy’; and (ii) ‘illusion of substantial improvements.’ These practices (or tactics) may to some extent explain the reason behind people’s preference for non-democratic leaders, yet further research is needed. While existing scholarship on autocratic survival explores the diversity of strategies that autocrats employ, this analysis aims to encourage additional research into the impact of suggested tactics on public perception and the dynamic of autocratic survival in such contexts as Russia, Belarus, Cuba, and others.
References
Buckley, N., Marquardt, K. L., Reuter, O. J., & Tertytchnaya, K. (2024). Endogenous popularity: How perceptions of support affect the popularity of authoritarian regimes. American Political Science Review, 118(2), 1046-1052.
Dai, Y., & Kustov, A. (2022). When do politicians use populist rhetoric? Populism as a campaign gamble. Political Communication, 39(3), 383-404.
Gandhi, J., & Przeworski, A. (2007). Authoritarian institutions and the survival of autocrats. Comparative political studies, 40(11), 1279-1301.
Guriev, S., & Treisman, D. (2020). The popularity of authoritarian leaders: A cross-national investigation. World Politics, 72(4), 601-638.
Hajnal, Á. (2024). Popular autocrats: why do voters support Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary? A quantitative analysis. Public Choice, 1-25.
Larres, K. (2022). Dictators and Autocrats: A Global Phenomenon. In Dictators and Autocrats: Securing Power across Global Politics. Routledge.
McKay, D. (2020). Facilitating Donald Trump: Populism, the Republican Party and Media Manipulation. Authoritarian populism and liberal democracy, 107-121.
About the author: Daria Blinova is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her research interests intersect between IR, comparative politics, and research methods fields. Her main focus is autocratic regime survival, foreign and domestic policy of Russia, environmental politics, as well as international development.
