How Do Inclusionary and Exclusionary Autocracies Affect Ordinary People?

Abstract

We propose a distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary autocratic ruling strategies and develop novel theoretical propositions on the legacy that these strategies leave on citizens’ political attitudes once the autocratic regime broke down. Using data of 1.3 million survey respondents from 71 countries and hierarchical age–period–cohort models, we estimate between and within cohort differences in citizens’ democratic support. We find that inclusionary regimes—with wider redistribution of socioeconomic and political benefits—leave a stronger antidemocratic legacy than exclusionary regimes on the political attitudes of their citizens. Similarly, citizens who were part of the winning group in an autocracy are more critical with democracy compared with citizens who were part of discriminated groups. This article contributes to our understanding about how autocracies affect the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens.

Keywords

authoritarianism public goods micro-foundation inclusion exclusion cohort analysis political socialization

Introduction

February 5, 2018, marked the day on which the Berlin Wall stood as long as it is gone—28 years and 3 months. Yet, the legacy of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) is still tangible. The autocratic rule of the GDR has left an imprint on the political attitudes of its citizens that did not cease to exist with the fall of the Berlin Wall, making many nostalgic about the autocratic past. Some have connected this so-called “Ostalgie” to antidemocratic resentment, which is widespread in East Germany. The former GDR is not an exception. Antidemocratic political attitudes last usually longer than the autocratic regime in which they developed. Yet, the GDR represents a particular type of autocracy that placed heavy emphasis on equal education, a comprehensive health system, and a wide distribution of socioeconomic benefits among the working class. Other regimes are less generous—in economic and political terms—toward their citizens.

Against this backdrop, our article is motivated by the question, to what extent ruling strategies of autocratic regimes influence the political attitudes of their citizens, even after these authoritarian regimes broke down. In particular, our research sheds light on the mechanism of authoritarian nostalgia and antidemocratic sentiments that are a product of authoritarian socialization. To achieve this, we bring two strands of research into a dialogue. Although the comparative authoritarianism literature has focused mainly on the inner workings of nondemocratic rule (Gandhi, 2008; Svolik, 2012), it paid less attention to the role of ordinary citizens. However, this is the starting point of the second strand of literature, the legacy literature, which is mainly interested in the effect that previous nondemocratic rule has on political beliefs and attitudes—once democracy is installed (Bernhard & Karakoç, 2007; Neundorf, 2010; Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2017). Yet, it is surprising that the legacy literature remains rather mute toward addressing the effect of variation in autocratic ruling strategies on political attitudes.

Theoretically, we rely on political socialization theory and argue that the political environment and the ruling strategy that someone experiences during the so-called “formative years” not only affect a citizen’s contemporary political attitudes but also leave a lasting imprint on her political attitudes in later life (Krosnick & Alwin, 1989; Mannheim, 1928; Sears & Funk, 1999). In other words, the sociopolitical experience as a young adult coins how one assesses politics later in life. More concretely, we are interested in the legacy effect that different authoritarian ruling strategies have on the political attitudes of citizens, in particular toward democracy. Focusing on the legacy here further allows us to infer about the public support created by these various ruling strategies during the dictatorship.

We propose a typological distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary strategies. Building upon Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow’s (2003) work, we distinguish between political and economic dimensions of inclusion and exclusion in autocracies. We argue that inclusionary autocracies tend to redistribute more of their political and economic resources toward their citizens to create a broad public support base. In contrast, exclusionary autocracies follow the opposite route and channel political influence and economic benefits to a small group of privileged (and, therefore, loyal) individuals who help the leader survive in power.¹

We show that these two different regime strategies of inclusion and exclusion affect the long-term political attitudes of ordinary citizens. To demonstrate the heterogeneity of the legacy effect and to arrive at a nuanced empirical picture, we test our theoretical argument with two complementary empirical strategies. First, we examine differences in political attitudes of citizens who were socialized under different autocratic ruling strategies on one hand, and who were brought up under democracy on the other hand (between-regime comparison). Second, we further examine differences in political attitudes between individuals who were socialized under the same autocratic regime, yet had different sociopolitical statuses, that is, belonging to an included group that profits from the regime or being particularly discriminated against and excluded from power (within-regime comparison).

The empirical analysis is based on a newly created, harmonized public opinion data set that combines 1,070 (country × wave × study)² existing surveys for 70 countries from around the world and data on authoritarian regimes’ ruling strategies from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data set (Coppedge et al., 2018). We use hierarchical age–period–cohort (HAPC) models to estimate the effect of these strategies on citizens’ attitudes toward democracy today.

We find that people who were socialized in exclusionary regimes are more supportive of democracy compared with citizens from more inclusionary regimes, and even democracies. As the policies of autocratic regimes become more inclusionary, this finding is reversed. Citizens from inclusionary regimes are less satisfied with democracy compared with citizens from exclusionary regimes and democracies. We also find a mutual reinforcement effect between political and economic inclusion. This means that if an authoritarian regime is economically inclusive by providing public goods to its citizens, being politically inclusive and incorporating a broad variety of societal groups into political power, significantly decreases later democratic support. The within-regime analysis further supports our theoretical expectation that authoritarian ruling strategies matter for the formation of citizens’ political attitudes.

This research contributes to existing literature in three crucial ways. First, we propose a new typological distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary autocracies. By so doing, we focus on the role of ordinary citizens under autocratic rule. Second, we are able to increase considerably the scope of former studies on authoritarian nostalgia that have mainly concentrated on post-Communist regimes. It is the first global analysis that includes 71 countries. Third, we are able to test rigorously the legacy effect that different autocratic ruling strategies have on citizens’ political attitudes. As such, our research has important implications for understanding the development of democratic dissatisfaction and antidemocratic resentments that might be already anchored in the minds of the people even before democracy has been installed.

Inclusionary and Exclusionary Authoritarian Regimes

We argue that dictators fall on a continuum between two types of ruling strategies: inclusionary and exclusionary. Our conception of inclusionary and exclusionary autocracy goes beyond the recent institutional focus in comparative authoritarianism. Instead of focusing on the institutional and elite power architecture (Geddes, 1999; Wright, & Frantz, 2014; Hadenius & Teorell, 2007) and the effect of formal and informal institutions in autocratic settings (Gandhi, 2008; Magaloni, 2008; Schedler, 2013; Svolik, 2012), we focus on examining the effect on ordinary citizens of inclusion and exclusion from political power and economic benefits.³

We define an inclusionary regime as a regime that relies on a broad public support base.⁴ These regimes incorporate various social, economic, and ethnic groups into their power structure by ensuring a wider redistribution of political and socioeconomic benefits to the population. This strategy aims at minimizing the threats that can emanate from within the society by buying off the opposition with political and economic concessions that are available only if they support the regime.

In contrast, we define an exclusionary regime as a regime with a narrow societal basis that excludes from power most social, religious, and ethnic groups. Its power stems from a narrow set of actors that obtain exclusive benefits. Exclusionary regimes rely more on redistributing particularistic goods to the members of the ruling elite, while actively restricting the access to power and economic redistribution to other groups from within society.⁵

This conceptualization of autocratic ruling strategies borrows conceptually from Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003) selectorate theory. The selectorate benefits from the redistributive policies of the regime as it provides the regime with the necessary support to extend its survival. However, because not all members of the selectorate can participate in autocratic governance, autocrats rely on an inner sanctum of elites, the winning coalition, that endows the autocrat with sufficient power to remain in power (Geddes et al., 2014; Svolik, 2012). Members of the selectorate who provide valuable service, and develop a network of support within their local organizations and communities can climb the political ladder and obtain positions in the winning coalition. Previous research in comparative authoritarianism has concentrated on the role of this winning coalition, but has undertheorized the effect of the governing strategies autocrats use to ensure the loyalty of its selectorate.

We use the selectorate theory as an important theoretical springboard.⁶ We build upon it and derive two separate dimensions. We distinguish explicitly between (a) political and (b) socioeconomic inclusion and exclusion strategies. When it comes to the political inclusion, we argue that dictators regulate access to political power by making use of decisive “qualities” such as ethnic origin, religious belief, and organizational and/or class membership (e.g., military generals, workers in Communist regimes). The dictator serves as the gatekeeper who decides on the basis of these specific attributes whom to include in power. The dictator can adopt a more inclusive ruling strategy by widening his support base and incorporating more societal groups in power, or he can restrict it to a very few, handpicked people whose support is necessary and sufficient to ensure autocratic survival.

Similarly, granting and withholding socioeconomic benefits can be used by autocrats to ensure the loyalty of the selectorate and winning coalition. Like access to power, this dimension can be narrowed down to very few or can be spread more equally among citizens. In other words, the co-optation efforts take place either on a restricted elite level and target strategically important business and military personnel, or they can reach the masses by gaining specific support among the wider population (Kim & Gandhi, 2010). As such, economic strategies of inclusion and exclusion range from the provision of public goods that do not discriminate against any social groups to a particularistic approach of distributing material benefits to very few.⁷

Regime Type and Their Effect on Ordinary Citizens

From these two opposing ruling strategies, we can now formulate expectations on how inclusionary and exclusionary regimes affect their citizens’ political attitudes. Inclusionary regimes try to win the hearts and minds of their people, whereas exclusionary regimes’ survival hinges on the loyalty of very few elite members. Inclusionary autocracies act through a wide redistribution of socioeconomic resources and political power, and build a dense network of support in society. Furthermore, we argue that inclusionary regimes are proactive in instilling a climate of proregime support among its citizens, one in which the regime is seen as benevolent for offering the citizens benefits that would otherwise be inaccessible. In exclusionary regimes, the dictator is more concerned with maintaining the loyalty of its ruling elite, making sure that any member of the ruling coalition does not threaten his position in power. In result, exclusionary regimes dismiss ordinary citizens from influencing politics and exclude them from economic redistribution.

Political Socialization and the Making of Generations

We expect citizens who are exposed to an inclusionary regime to be more supportive of the regime as these regimes actively try to develop a proregime sentiment among its citizens by providing them with benefits in exchange for their support for the regime. Unfortunately, we are usually not able to observe regime support during existing dictatorships, as representative and comparable public opinion research is almost impossible during authoritarian regimes (Kuran, 1997).⁸ Yet, we argue here that this is not necessary. Instead, we use the theoretical and methodological approach of cohort analysis, which allows the identification of distinct characteristics of those generations that were socialized under different political regimes. Generations thereby function like fossils that carry evidence of a long gone past. Here, we assume that the political preferences of whole generations that grew up under inclusionary or exclusionary regimes have been shaped and remain prevalent in the population, especially for those who experienced these regime during the so-called formative years during adolescence.⁹

These expectations build on the theory of political socialization, which argues that fundamental values are acquired largely in early adulthood. The theory goes back to the seminal work of Karl Mannheim and has been later refined and empirically tested (Krosnick & Alwin, 1989; Mannheim, 1928; Sears & Funk, 1999). Young citizens, it is believed, are not yet set in their political ways and are subsequently more easily influenced by external factors such as the nature of the political regime in which they live (Bartels & Jackman, 2014). Political socialization theory argues that after the formation period in early adulthood, these attitudes and preferences remain relatively intact and constant. Fundamental change becomes rare (Jennings, 1989; Sears & Valentino, 1997).

We assume that citizens’ political attitudes that developed under autocracies are imprinted through the ruling strategies of the regime. As such, we expect to observe differences between the political attitudes of citizens socialized in inclusionary regimes and exclusionary regimes. More precisely, citizens from inclusionary autocracies will be more supportive of that regime, which, in turn, is expected to lead to higher nostalgia if the regime is overthrown. If citizens experience an inclusionary authoritarian ruling strategy in their formative years, they might value the gains of autocratic inclusion higher than potential liberal values of democratic systems.

Conversely, the majority of citizens who experienced exclusionary ruling strategies during their formative years will be less nostalgic about the autocratic past and, hence, are expected to embrace democratic values. They did not profit from the former autocratic regime as they were exempted from political power and material benefits. As such, they value the potential gains and promises of democratic societies higher compared with the previous autocratic situation. After democratization, they perceive themselves now on an even playing field that provides equal chances for economic success and political participation.

Finally, we should contrast citizens’ political attitudes that grew up in democratic and autocratic societies. We assume that citizens who were socialized in democracies should be generally more supportive of democracy than citizens from former autocracies because they developed democratic attitudes and preferences early on in their life by living in a democracy during their formative years (Fuchs-Schündeln & Schündeln, 2015).

Based on the theory of political socialization under different regime forms, we formulate the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1 (H1): Generations that were socialized in inclusionary autocracies are more supportive of that regime and are, therefore, less positive with democracy than generations that grew up in exclusionary autocracies or in democracies.

We further hypothesize that the two dimensions of inclusion—political and economic—interact and mutually strengthen each other. We argue that support for the authoritarian regime and the subsequent nostalgia and dissatisfaction with democracy become stronger when high economic inclusion during the formative years is met with high political inclusion. We expect political and economic inclusion to have a stronger effect together than in isolation. We argue that a doubly inclusive situation in which citizens are included politically and economically amplifies support for the authoritarian regime. This, in turn, translates into a growing skepticism with democracy. Against this backdrop, we formulate a reinforcement effect in Hypothesis 2.

Hypothesis 2 (H2): High level of economic inclusion coupled with high political inclusion has a negative effect on democratic support.

H1 and H2 refer to differences between regimes. We expect to find clear generational differences in terms of political preferences of people who grew up under different regimes within the same country and between different countries. However, all autocratic societies are heterogeneous to some extent. The selectorate defines who is included and excluded from politics. It defines who might potentially profit from the regime and who is discriminated against. To be a member of the selectorate constitutes a necessary condition for profiting from an autocratic regime.

We define insiders of the selectorate as the potential “winners” of an autocratic regime, which are more included in terms of political and economic benefits, whereas outsiders of the selectorate are “losers.” Whereas the members of the selectorate are addressed politically and profit, at least potentially, from socioeconomic redistribution, the latter group has no access to power or material benefits. Against this backdrop, we can further break down our argument about inclusion and exclusion. We expand the between-regime comparison with the composition of society within an existing regime. We would expect that specific groups that were included in the power and socioeconomic benefit structure (i.e., winners) are more supportive of the former regime than those that have been excluded for social, ethnic, or religious reasons (i.e., losers). Those suppressed groups within a regime should be more resistant to the regime socialization, as they experience firsthand the exclusive nature of the regime (Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2017). Furthermore, we would expect them to be more positive about the democratic transition as they gained the most from the democratization. In this light, we derive the third hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3 (H3): Social and ethnic groups included in the selectorate of an autocratic regime are more supportive of the autocratic regime and, therefore, less positive with democracy than social and ethnic groups excluded from it.

Research Design

To test our hypotheses, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of 70 (post)authoritarian countries during the entire 20th century from around the globe that experienced variations of inclusionary and exclusionary regimes. As discussed above, we identify the effect of autocracies on their citizens by comparing generations within the same country and between countries that were exposed to varying contexts during their formative years. This empirical phenomenon of varying socialization experiences within the same country or regime gives us the opportunity to study the lasting imprint of political regimes, even after their existence. We are further able to contrast groups of generations that grew up under dictatorships and those that came of age under democracy.

To achieve this empirical test, we need to distinguish three colinear time trends: age, period, and cohort (APC) effects. A person could have positive or negative views of democracy because she is young (the so-called life cycle or aging effect), or because she lives in a country that faces a big political corruption scandal (the so-called period effect that affects everyone no matter their age or birth year), or because she was socialized at a certain point in history (the cohort effect). Here, we are mainly interested in the cohort effect, which we argue contains the socialization effect of political regimes. This methodological approach allows us to indirectly test the impact autocratic ruling strategies have on the mass public.

We conduct two sets of empirical tests to investigate our three hypotheses. First, we test our theory contrasting inclusionary and exclusionary regimes by contrasting them to democracies as a baseline (H1 and H2). Second, we conduct two within-regime analyses, where we subdivide the population into winners and losers of former authoritarian regimes, which test the direct effect of profiting from an autocratic regime or being particularly discriminated (H3).

Individual-Level Data

To test our hypotheses, we merge existing, publicly available survey data from numerous countries from around the globe—both well-established democracies as well as former dictatorships. We chose the data sets that have been designed to be fielded in several countries, which ensures that questions are less country specific but rather to travel across borders. Furthermore, all studies have been conducted as academic studies and, hence, adhere to a certain standard. Moreover, we only chose studies that included questions related to democratic attitudes and political engagement. The newly created harmonized public opinion data set combines 1,070 (country × wave × study) existing surveys for 70 countries from around the world with a total of 1,422 different country–cohorts.¹⁰ We harmonized the data of the following public opinion surveys (including the years that they were fielded):

World Values Survey (WVS), 1981 to 2014;

Latinobarometer (LB), 1995 to 2015;

Asian Barometer (ANB), 2001 to 2014;

Afrobarometer (AFB), 1999 to 2015;

Americas Barometer (AB), 2004 to 2014;

European Values Study (EVS), 1981 to 2010;

European Social Survey (ESS), 2002 to 2014;

Eurobarometer (EB), 1970 to 2002;

Central and Eastern European Barometer (CEEB), 1990 to 1997; and

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), 1996 to 2015.

Pooling all these data sets together gives us about 1.3 million respondents for whom we have valid data on two dependent variables and all control variables. The different survey questions included in the diverse data sets were harmonized so that a joint analysis is possible. More details on the question of harmonization decisions can be found in Online Appendices 3 and 4.

Dependent Variables: Authoritarian Nostalgia and Democratic Support

To measure the impact inclusionary and exclusionary regimes had on people’s hearts and minds, we ideally want to measure support for the authoritarian regime. Unfortunately, it is not possible to measure regime support in a direct way, as public opinion surveys are usually not available. An indirect measure for regime support is, however, whether people feel nostalgic for these regimes once they are overthrown. Using the third wave (1999-2000) of the EVS, we can use a question on evaluating the former Communist regime as good or bad¹¹ for 14 Central and Eastern European countries.¹² As we have postulated in our theory, we expect that nostalgia for the previous authoritarian regime affect the evaluation of democracy.¹³ The EVS data allow us to explore the relationship between authoritarian nostalgia (support) and democratic support, which we are able to measure across time and a large set of countries.

We assume that the higher nostalgia with the Communist regime, the more critical people would be with democracy. Figure 1 plots this correlation with our two dependent variables—“satisfaction with democracy” (Figure 1a) and “democracy is the best form of government” (Figure 1b)—using our 14 countries and three generations, those who grew up before, during, or after the Cold War. Plotting the average nostalgia and democratic support for each country–cohort, Figure 1 shows nostalgia is weakest among the generation that grew up after the end of Communism, which is what we would expect based on our theory. The individual-level correlation between satisfaction with democracy and authoritarian nostalgia is r = −.43, which is strong. The correlation is even stronger between democracy as the best form of government and Communist nostalgia (r = −.68).¹⁴

Figure 1.

Correlation between Communist nostalgia and democratic support: (a) satisfaction with democracy and (b) democracy best form of government.

The findings of Figure 1 support our assumption that using measures of democratic support are suitable proxies for authoritarian support (nostalgia). For the remainder of the article, we, therefore, use measures of democratic support, which have a higher longitudinal and geographic coverage and, hence, allow us to test our three hypotheses more accurately.

Political support is one of the key factors in the development of a democratic political culture (Almond & Verba, 1963; Easton, 1965). The aim is to measure the extent to which citizens support the democratic system using the satisfaction with the way democracy works. We, thereby, assume that the expression of satisfaction asks respondents to evaluate the performance of the political system (Linde & Ekman, 2003; Norris, 1999).¹⁵ Furthermore, asking citizens about the “satisfaction with democracy” is less abstract than the usual question of support for “democracy as the best way of government,” which we do, however, use in a separate test too.

In the data sets that were harmonized for this study, respondents were asked uniformly how satisfied are you with the way democracy works in your country.¹⁶ Response categories, however, varied from 4 to 11. The variable was standardized to 0 to 100, whereas lower values mean less satisfaction with democracy. To account for the specific effects due to study design or questionnaire design, we include the study (e.g., WVS, ESS) as a control variable into the model, which also accounts for the difference in response categories.¹⁷

Individual-Level Control Variables

We control for the gender of respondents, the education level (primary or less, secondary, postsecondary),¹⁸ and a dummy variable whether a respondent is working as opposed to being unemployed, retired, or any other reason why people do not work.¹⁹

Measuring Inclusionary and Exclusionary Regimes

Data on the inclusionary and exclusionary regime dimensions come from the V-Dem project (Coppedge et al., 2018).²⁰ The unit of observation in our sample is country-year (1915-2015), for the 70 countries for which we have survey data.

We capture political inclusiveness by calculating the average score between two indicators: power distribution by social group and by socioeconomic status. The former variable captures whether any social group²¹ is more politically relevant compared with other social groups in that country. It is an ordinal measure that ranges from monopoly of one group (value = 0) to all social groups having equal political power (value = 4).²² The latter variable captures whether more wealth and income translates into more political power for citizens and groups. It is also an ordinal variable ranging from wealthy people enjoying monopoly over political power (0) to political power being more or less equally distributed across economic groups (4).

Economic inclusiveness of regimes is captured using a measure of the type of expenditures used by the regime. It is an ordinal variable ranging from particularistic spending targeted toward specific societal actors (0) to public spending being intended to benefit all groups within a society, including the poor or underprivileged (4).

As the hypotheses also focus on the distinction between autocracies and democracy, we use an indicator for regime type that is based on V-Dem’s electoral democracy index, whereby the absence of democracy measures autocracy. The index is continuous and ranges between 0 and 1, where higher values indicate democracy. We follow Lindberg (2016), and dichotomize this measure where a regime with a value of the index equal or above 0.67 is considered a democracy, and an autocracy otherwise.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of regimes based on the average measure of political power and economic inclusiveness by regime type. The countries in the bottom left corners in Figure 2 are regimes that exclude citizens based on social group membership and wealth, and also whose public goods spending is particularistic. We observe that, on average, democracies tend to have higher levels of inclusion into power and more public goods provision. Conversely, autocracies that exclude citizens based on socioeconomic status or social group membership also tend to use more particularistic spending rather than public goods provision. This pattern is consistent with the logic of the selectorate theory as regimes will be more likely to rely on public goods provision as the size of their selectorate and winning coalition increases (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003).

Figure 2.

Average political power and economic inclusion by regime type.

All variables are continuous, except the dummy variable that measures whether the regime was an autocracy or democracy. The macro variables are averaged across 5-year intervals from 1915 to 2015 and matched to the corresponding national generation that came of age during a particular 5-year period.²³

Macro Control Variables

Several variables are included in the models to rule out the possibility that citizens’ democratic satisfaction is not explained by the current state of affairs in their polity and economy (Karp, Banducci, & Bowler, 2003; Wagner, Schneider, & Halla, 2009). First, we include the economic development level by including gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at the 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) value of the dollar (source: World Bank), as we expect that economic performance of the regime affects people’s reported satisfaction with democracy (Krieckhaus, Son, Bellinger, & Wells, 2013; Lipset, 1960). Second, we include the current level of democracy, as the type of democratic political system in which citizens live affects their views of democracy (Anderson & Guillory, 1997; Wells & Krieckhaus, 2006). Third, we include the age of the democratic system because the amount of time an individual has lived in a democracy might affect his or her democratic attitudes (Fuchs-Schündeln & Schündeln, 2015). Finally, we include the level of political corruption²⁴ (Wagner et al., 2009), as citizens engage in comparing how well democracy deals with corruption compared with autocracies (Rose-Ackerman, 1996).

The Model

As outlined above, we take a generational perspective to test our hypotheses and, thereby, rely on an APC model. The most important covariates are, therefore, first, the age of the respondents, which we include as age in years. Second, we measure cohorts in 5-year groupings when respondents turned 15,²⁵ assuming that this is the time of socialization when the political regime has the strongest and lasting impact on its citizens (Bartels & Jackman, 2014). Finally, we include the year of the survey to capture the period effect. The problem of estimating these three time effects simultaneously is the identification problem, as

C o h o r t = S u r v e y Y e a r - A g e .

Yang and Land (2006) proposed to solve this identification problem by including cohort clusters (in our case, 5-year groups) and survey years as random effects into an HAPC model. In this multilevel model, we consider periods and cohorts as cross-classified contexts in which individuals are nested. Including macro-level variables that capture the cohort context (inclusionary vs. exclusionary autocracy at age 15) as well as the period context (current level economic and political measures in the same year as survey is conducted) allows to test the effect of these context variables on democratic attitudes. The model is specified as

D e m S u p p o r t_{i j t c} = α_{o j t} + β_{1} A g e_{i t} + \sum_{m = 2}^{M} β_{m} X_{m i} + \sum_{c = 2}^{C} γ_{c} C + ε_{i j t c},

where we model support for democracy of respondent i who belongs to cohort j, was interviewed in year t, and lives in country c as a function of her age and our individual-level control variables X. We further include country-fixed effects to account for potential country-specific differences, such as responding to survey questions. The most important part of this model is the random intercept $α_{o j t}$ , which can be written as

α_{o j t} = γ_{0} + γ_{1} A u t o c_{j} + γ_{2} I n c l_{j} + γ_{3} A u t o c_{j} \times I n c l_{j} + \sum_{p = 4}^{p} γ_{p} V_{p t} + u_{0 j 0} + u_{00 t},

where $γ_{0}$ measures the grand mean. $γ_{1}$ to $γ_{3}$ measure the impact of the each cohort’s formative context, measured as 5-year average contexts when respondents were between 15 and 20 years old, a specification that is scrutinized in a series of robustness tests. We test H1 with an interaction between the level of inclusiveness (political or economic) and whether the country at the time was an autocracy. If H1 is correct, we expect $γ_{3}$ to be negative and significant. The vector V measures the current period effects, which measured on the country-level at the year of the survey. Here, we treat our dependent variables as continuous, estimating linear HAPC models.

Global Analysis: Between-Regime Variation

In this section, we present the empirical results of a global cohort analysis of the impact of autocratic inclusiveness on democratic support that utilizes the between-regime differences, with some people having experienced an autocracy and some not within the same country and across countries.

Descriptive Analysis

First, we graphically explore the relationship between inclusiveness and democratic support. Figure 3 plots the average satisfaction with democracy, our main dependent variable, for each of the 1,422 cohorts in our 63 countries. We graphically distinguish between those generations that grew up in an autocratic (Panels A and C) or democratic system (Panels B and D) according to the level of political (top panels) and economic inclusion (bottom panels).

Figure 3.

Mean satisfaction with democracy (by country–cohort) over political and economic inclusion during cohort’s formative years (at c): (A) autocracy (at c)—political dimension, (B) democracy (at c)—political dimension, (C) autocracy (at c)—economic dimension, and (D) democracy (at c)—economic dimension.

As Figure 3 clearly shows, cohorts that grew up in more inclusive dictatorships—whether economically or politically—are less likely to evaluate the democratic system as positive compared with cohorts that were socialized in more exclusive regimes. We compare these results with democracies that give us a reference point of the relationship between inclusiveness and democratic support. As the two right panels in Figure 3 confirm, the relationship is reversed in democracies. Cohorts that grew up in more inclusive democracies are also more positive toward the functioning of the democratic system today.

In the next section, we use HAPC models to test whether the graphical pattern shown in Figure 3 holds when we use more rigorous models that account for APC effects as well as include important control variables on both the micro and macro levels.

Results of HAPC Models

We estimate an HAPC model as introduced above to predict a respondent level of democratic support, which varies from 0 to 100, where higher values indicate higher support. Including an interaction effect of inclusionary strategies and whether the country was an autocracy at the time each cohort was socialized test H1.

Table 1 reports the impact of two dimensions of regime strategies on satisfaction with democracy, our first dependent variable. Model 1 presents the results of the impact of access to political power. The results confirm our hypothesis. The more access autocracies provided to their citizens, the lower the satisfaction with democracy today ( $γ_{3}$ = −4.874). With every unit increase in access to political power, democratic satisfaction is 2.905 lower among generations of former dictatorships. The main effect of the dummy variable capturing the regime type relates to autocracies that were completely politically exclusionary (holding all other variables at their mean), which produces higher democratic satisfaction levels than compared with cohorts that grew up in democracies ( $γ_{1}$ = 6.985). The same pattern is confirmed for the second dimension of inclusiveness—access to political resources via public good provision—presented in Model 2. All effects are statistically significant on the 1% level.

Table 1.

Linear HAPC Model Predicting Satisfaction With Democracy.

	M1—Pol. power		M2—Public good		M3—Interaction
	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE
Age	0.085***	(0.005)	0.093***	(0.004)	0.086***	(0.004)
Socialization context (at c)
Autocracy	6.958***	(0.897)	6.432***	(0.735)	−14.093***	(2.001)
Political power	2.905***	(0.345)			−5.812***	(0.813)
Autocracy × Political Power	−4.874***	(0.297)			7.292***	(0.842)
Public good			3.302***	(0.236)	−4.262***	(0.774)
Autocracy × Public Good			−4.203***	(0.229)	7.397***	(0.831)
Pol. Power × Public Good					2.490***	(0.269)
Autocracy × Pol. Power × Public Good					−4.020***	(0.301)
Current context (at t)
Level of democracy	−32.883***	(9.583)	−33.059***	(9.581)	−32.991***	(9.569)
Age of democracy	−0.289***	(0.053)	−0.294***	(0.053)	−0.289***	(0.053)
Log GDP (per C)	8.945***	(1.582)	8.883***	(1.582)	8.919***	(1.580)
Political corruption	2.417	(0.670)	2.341	(7.668)	2.379	(7.659)
Individual-level controls
Female	−0.397***	(0.046)	−0.399***	(0.046)	−0.400***	(0.046)
Education (ref: primary)
Secondary	0.350***	(0.063)	0.346***	(0.063)	0.351***	(0.063)
Postsecondary	2.368***	(0.075)	2.368***	(0.075)	2.372***	(0.075)
Working	1.291***	(0.052)	1.293***	(0.052)	1.281***	(0.052)
Country FE	Yes		Yes		yes
Data FE	Yes		yes		yes
Intercept	−17.426	(17.589)	−17.862	(17.569)	−1.337	(17.652)
Variance component
Cohort (1900-2010)	2.503***	(0.080)	2.446***	(0.079)	2.103***	(0.069)
Period (1973-2015)	5.695***	(0.143)	5.694***	(0.143)	5.687***	(0.143)
N (of respondents)	1,286,878		1,286,878		1,286,878
N (of countries)	63		63		63
AIC	11,960,215		11,960,178		11,959,973

Source. Harmonized survey data from 1,070 national data sets. List of data sets in Online Appendix 2. V-Dem, 1915-2015.

Entries are regression coefficients and their standard errors of an HAPC model. The dependent variable varies from, for example, 0 = not satisfied at all to 100 = completely satisfied. HAPC = hierarchical age–period–cohort; GDP = gross domestic product; FE = fixed effects; AIC = Akaike information criterion; V-Dem = Varieties of Democracy.

p < .1. **p < .05. ***p < .01.

These effects are further illustrated in Figure 4, which plots the predicted values of the two dependent variables, for the varying levels of political and economic inclusion distinguishing for having been socialized in a democracy (dashed line) versus an autocracy (solid line). Figure 4a and 4b plot the predicted values of satisfaction with democracies, which is based on M1 and M2 of the results presented in Table 1. For example, Figure 4a shows a steep, negative slope for autocracies. Satisfaction with democracy is predicted to be at 52 points (so positive) in former extremely politically exclusionary regimes (score = 0). However, if a respondent grew up in a very politically inclusionary regime (score = 4), predicted satisfaction with democracy is 8.732 points lower. We can also compare this effect with those who grew up in democracies. Here, as one might expect, we find a positive effect. The more access to political power or economic resources is available in people’s youth, the more positive they seem to be about democracy today.

Figure 4.

Predicted satisfaction with democracy (A + B) and agreement that democracy is best form of government (C + D) by regime socialization: (A) political power (at c) on satisfaction with democracy, (B) public good provision (at c) on satisfaction with democracy, (C) political power (at c) on democracy best, and (D) public good provision (at c) on democracy best.

Figure 4c and 4d further plot the main results for our second dependent variable, whether people agree that democracy is the best form of government. The results are less strong for this variable; however, H1 is, nevertheless, confirmed. As predicted by our theory, those exposed to more inclusive regimes are more critical with democracy, which we interpret as a form of nostalgia and support for the previous dictatorship.

In the next step, we turn to our test of H2, which postulates that the political and economic dimensions of inclusiveness reinforce each other. We test this hypothesis using a three-way interaction between the values of our two dimensions and the regime type at the time when respondents were socialized. The results are presented in Model 3 of Table 1. Interpreting three-way interactions is not straightforward and we, therefore, focus on the graphical interpretation presented in Figure 5. Figure 5 plots the marginal effects of access to political power on satisfaction with democracy for different levels of public good provision. Again, we distinguish between the regime type—democracies (dashed line) and autocracies (solid line). The marginal effects can be interpreted as the regression coefficient for political power inclusiveness.

Figure 5.

Marginal effects of access to political power on satisfaction with democracy by public good provision.

As Figure 5 demonstrates, in autocracies that rely on excessive public good provision (value = 4), increasing political power will lead to a negative impact on satisfaction with democracy. Given the marginal effect of about 4.8, going from no political access to full access would decrease democratic satisfaction by 19.2 points on a 0 to 100 scale. This impact of political inclusiveness is weaker in countries that are less economically generous, which confirms H2.

Interestingly, Figure 5 also reveals that if an autocracy relies on the provision of particularistic goods only (value = 0), increasing access to political power will have a positive effect on democratic satisfaction. Here, the positive legacy effect of economic exclusiveness seems to outweigh the negative effect of higher political inclusiveness. The effect is, however, relatively small and significant only on the 5% level. In Online Appendix 9, we further present these results plotting the marginal effects of public good provision against political power.²⁶

Robustness Tests

We test the sensitivity of our results using a series of additional tests, which are presented in Online Appendices 11 and 12. First, we exchange our measure of economic inclusiveness by using income at the time of socialization instead of public good provision.²⁷ We replace the level of economic inclusiveness of the regime (particularistic vs. public goods provision) with the level of inequality for the following reason: The level of inequality of a regime should be the product of the redistributive policies of the regime. More simply, if a regime provides more public goods, then the level of inequality should be lower compared with cases when the regime provides particularistic goods. If that is true, then we should observe the following: Citizens socialized under higher inequality should be more satisfied with democracy compared with citizens socialized under lower inequality. The analysis using inequality shows that satisfaction with democracy of post-1945 cohorts increases as the level of inequality of their regime increases.

Second, other characteristics of authoritarian regimes could drive their legacy on democratic attitudes. We, therefore, rerun the analysis including two additional factors to account for the characteristics of regimes, when different generations were socialized. First, we account for physical repression, measured by torture and political killings.²⁸ Autocracies often use hard repression as another tool to control the mass population. The level of repression also could affect the inclusiveness of the regime, with more exclusive regimes using more physical force than inclusive regimes. We, therefore, add this control variable to our main models, presented in Table 1, Model 3, predicting satisfaction with democracy. The three-way interaction effect between the two dimensions of inclusiveness and growing up in a dictatorship is slightly reduced (from b = −4.020, p < .000 in M3 in Table 1 to b = −3.560, p < .000). This difference is borderline significant, which indicates that, indeed, some of the effect of regime inclusiveness is through the use of repression, which has a negative effect on democratic satisfaction. The less repressive the regime was during a respondent’s formative years, the more positive she is about democracy (b = 4.433, p < .001).

Furthermore, we account for the level of economic development at the time of regime socialization measured using logged GDP (per capita).²⁹ We could argue that the level of political and economic inclusiveness depends, in part, on how developed a country is in general. In poor countries, public provision of services and inclusion of ordinary citizens into the political process might be more important than in very developed countries, where citizens are less dependent on state provision. To test this argument, we include logged GDP (per capita) in the model as a control variable (see Table A11, M3.1, in the online appendix). Controlling for economic development significantly reduces the three-way interaction effect, which tests H2 (b = −2.078, p < .000). This implies that some of the legacy impact of authoritarian ruling strategies is dependent on the level of economic development.

We explore this further by repeating the analysis on the subset of cohorts that grew up in autocracies and interacted the level of economic inclusiveness that they were exposed to and the nation’s logged GDP (see Table A11, M3.2, in the online appendix). The impact of public good provision is the strongest for midlevel countries and insignificant when countries are very poor or very rich. Poor countries will not be able to credibly supply public goods to its citizens, and in very rich countries, it might not matter whether the regime provides goods or not, as citizens might just generally profit from the wealth of the country. Importantly, the results do confirm the hypothesis that more economically inclusive regimes produce long-term negative legacies on democratic satisfaction, especially in countries at the midrange of economic development, where governmental actions might be most influential.

Third, we changed the sample that we use in our analysis, by applying a more restrictive inclusion criteria for cohorts by excluding 242 cohorts (14%) that have fewer than 50 observations. These relatively empty cells are more prone to outliers. Rerunning the analysis of M3, shown in Table 1, confirms our results that the more inclusive autocracies are during respondents’ formative years, the less positive they are with the democratic system (see Table A11, Model 4, in the online appendix).

Finally, we tested the sensitivity of our cohort specification by, first, altering the age at which we assume the formative years to take place and, second, changing the cohort groupings. The results for both robustness tests are presented in Online Appendix 12. Regarding the first test, we estimate models that match the regime ruling strategies when respondents were (a) 5 to 10 years old, (b) 10 to 15 years old, (c) 15 to 20 years old (the specification used for the main results), (d) 20 to 25 years old, (e) 25 to 30 years old, and (f) 30 to 35 years old. It does not really matter at what age someone is exposed to certain regime strategies. The results are robust for all different specifications of the formative years. However, we decided to follow previous theoretical and empirical evidence to determine the age of the formative years to be between 15 and 20 years (Bartels & Jackman, 2014).

In a second test, we changed the cohort grouping by testing whether the results are sensitive to specifying the length of the formative years as 2-, 5-, 8-, or 10-year intervals at the age of 15 years. This varies our number of country–cohorts from 3,607 to 785. As the results of Online Appendix 12.2 show, our findings are not sensitive to the cohort length. For the main models presented above, we, however, decided to keep the 5-year cohorts, as this is standard in cohort analysis (Fienberg & Mason, 1979; Mason, Mason, Winsborough, & Poole, 1973).

Within-Regime Variation—Winners and Losers of Autocracies

After having established that authoritarian ruling strategies have a lasting imprint on citizens’ democratic attitudes across countries, we now present two empirical tests to investigate the within-regime heterogeneity of varying experiences of people who experienced the same ruling strategy. To test H3, we first investigate 11 post-Communist countries by focusing on the working class as a social group that very much profited from the regime, whereas religious people were the most suppressed in practicing their beliefs. Second, we use ethnic power divisions as another example of winners and losers of dictatorships. In some regimes, certain ethnic groups are dominant in holding political power, whereas other groups are discriminated.³⁰

Within-Regime Analysis I: Working Class Versus Religion in Former Communist Regimes

Communist ideology is based on secularization and the empowerment of the working class. This creates clear winners—working class—and losers—religious people—of Communist regimes. We test whether this led to varying levels of democratic support in the post-Communist era in 11 Central Eastern European countries using the data from the ESS only. The ESS included in five waves (2004-2012) the question about the occupation of the respondent’s father at the age of 14. We, thereby, contrast those who come from a working class with the rest. The rationale of using father’s occupation is that we first assume that the social class position during the formative years is most important for crystalizing a sense of belonging to the regime. More precisely, people who grew up in a working-class family are expected to have been socialized into belonging to the selectorate of the Communist regimes. Hence, they are likely to be more critical with the democratic system today, as they might feel that they lost out in the transition compared with socialist times.

Second, we use father’s occupation rather than the respondent’s own occupation, as there is potential social mobility and we can, hence, not know whether a person’s current social class corresponds to the social class at the time of socialization. We contrast these winners of socialism with religious people who were very much repressed by the state-driven secularization of socialist societies (Mueller & Neundorf, 2012). Here, we measure religion simply by denomination comparing those who are not religious with those who are Christians.

The results of these analyses are reported in Table 2. Here, we interact whether a respondent belongs to the winners or losers with a dummy variable whether this person grew up during the Communist regime. The results are illustrated in Figure 6.

Table 2.

Linear Regression: Satisfaction With Democracy (Eastern Europe Only).

	M1: Social class		M2: Religion
	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE
Age	−0.010	(0.008)	−0.045***	(0.006)
Socialization context (at c)
Cold War generation	−3.934***	(0.378)	−3.771***	(0.317)
Father worker	−3.220***	(0.387)
Cold War Generation × Father Worker	1.602***	(0.458)
Religion (ref: none)
Christian			1.066***	(0.330)
Muslim			3.967**	(1.945)
Other			0.413	(2.321)
Cold War Generation ×
Christian			1.161***	(0.380)
Muslim			2.516	(2.239)
Other			−0.613	(3.015)
Individual-level controls
Female	−0.577***	(0.209)	−0.738***	(0.182)
Income (ref: bottom 20%)
Income: 20%-40%	2.555***	(0.309)	2.929***	(0.267)
Income: 40%-60%	4.864***	(0.320)	5.229***	(0.280)
Income: 60%-80%	3.633***	(0.321)	4.112***	(0.280)
Income: 80%-100%	2.181***	(0.400)	3.340***	(0.325)
Education (ref: primary)
Secondary	−1.393*	(0.711)	−2.074***	(0.532)
Postsecondary	2.425***	(0.742)	1.917***	(0.568)
Working	0.612**	(0.248)	−0.327	(0.205)
Country FE (N = 11)	Yes		Yes
Year FE (N = 5)	Yes		Yes
Intercept	27.804***	(1.016)	26.813***	(0.855)
n	51,528		68,542
Adjusted R²	.094		.091

Source. ESS, 2004-2012.

The prediction is based on a linear regression with country FE, controlling for gender, education, and working. Central European countries only (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, East Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine). FE = fixed effects; ESS = European Social Survey.

p < .1. **p < .05. ***p < .01.

Figure 6.

Predicted satisfaction with democracy by social background, religion, and regime socialization: (a) father’s occupation and (b) religion.

First of all, we see generally much lower levels of satisfaction with democracy for the generation who grew up under Communisms contrasted to those who belong the post-Communist generation who grew up in democratic times. Nevertheless, the pattern emerging from Figure 6 clearly confirms H3. Respondents who were raised in a working-class family are most critical with democracy today, whereas those who are religious are significantly more satisfied with democracy. The difference between winners and losers is small, but significant.

Within-Regime Analysis II: Ethnic Political Power Relationship

Our second within-regime analysis focuses on ethnicity as a source for creating winners and losers, that is, membership in the autocratic selectorate. For this purpose, we rely on data from the WVS, which included a detailed measure of ethnicity as well as the dependent variable in Wave 4 (1999-2004). We match the ethnicity code of the WVS to that of the data of Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) project (Vogt et al., 2015). The EPR provides annual data (1946-2013) on politically relevant ethnic groups,³¹ their relative size as a share of the country population, and their access to power. We included in our data only the groups that could be clearly identified to avoid collapsing too much EPR heterogeneity into one category.³² Finally, we have 77 ethnic groups from 21 countries. To adjust for sampling of different groups, we correct the results by using population weights provided by the WVS.

EPR codes the access to power of ethnic group on an ordinal scale, with three main categories, which are then divided into subcategories.³³ Here, we contrast only two types of political power ethnic groups can have. First, a group can be dominant by ruling alone (EPR classification: monopoly or dominance) or a group can be discriminated by being excluded from power (EPR classification: powerless or discriminated). We do not count self-exclusion as a form of discrimination.

Table 3 reports the results of a linear regression on satisfaction of democracy, where we identify whether a respondent belongs to an ethnic group that was discriminated or dominant during an autocratic regime at the time of socialization (Model 1). In Model 2, we further measure the size of the discriminated (M2a) and dominant group (M2b). Again, we interact these variables with the political regime (democratic vs. autocratic) at the time of adolescence. The results confirm H2, as people who belong to a discriminated group at time of the autocracy are significantly more positive with democracy today.

Table 3.

Linear Regression: Satisfaction With Democracy and Ethnic Power.

	M1: Dominant vs. Discriminated		Size of group
	M1: Dominant vs. Discriminated			M2a: Discriminated		M2b: Dominant
	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE	Coefficient	SE
Age	0.042	(0.025)	0.038*	(0.022)	0.032	(0.023)
Socialization context (at c)
Autocracy	−1.410	(1.092)	−0.933	(0.899)	0.512	(1.178)
Discriminated (vs. dominant)	0.347	(1.300)
Size of discriminated group			−1.262	(5.201)
Size of dominant group					0.252	(1.551)
Autocracy × Ethnic Group	3.279**	(1.490)	18.059***	(5.361)	−0.405	(1.715)
Individual-level controls
Female	−1.121*	(0.654)	−0.489	(0.580)	−0.641	(0.592)
Education (ref: primary)
Secondary	−0.055	(0.857)	1.126	(0.752)	0.485	(0.744)
Postsecondary	−0.289	(0.898)	0.517	(0.791)	−0.134	(0.781)
Working	0.345	(0.709)	0.436	(0.621)	0.274	(0.632)
Country FE (N = 21)	Yes		Yes		Yes
Intercept	36.453***	(2.309)	34.962***	(2.137)	34.397***	(2.230)
n (of respondents)	12,110		14,440		14,440
R ²	.205		.228		.218

Source. WVS, Wave 4 only. Weighted by population weight. FE = fixed effects; WVS = World Values Survey.

p < .1. **p < .05. ***p < .01.

These effects are illustrated in Figures 7 and 8. As Figure 7 shows, there is a 6-point difference in democratic satisfaction between those who belong to the dominant group and those who belong to the discriminated group. Turning to the size of the ethnic group in Model 2 and Figure 8, it is striking how strong the effect is especially if a large group was suppressed. If a minority ethnic group ruled an autocracy and the discriminated group is in the majority, satisfaction with democracy is much higher. This clearly supports the idea that there is a feeling of liberation for such a discriminated group.

Figure 7.

Predicted satisfaction with democracy by ethnic power position and regime socialization.

Figure 8.

Predicted satisfaction with democracy by size of ethnic power position and regime socialization: (a) size of discriminated group and (b) size of dominant group.

Conclusion

This article proposed a distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary ruling strategies of autocracies that cast a long shadow on political attitudes even after the regime broke down. We argue that citizens’ political attitudes toward democracy are shaped by the policies of the authoritarian regime in which they spent their formative years. Our theoretical expectations were that citizens who were socialized in more inclusionary regimes are more critical with democracy than citizens who spent their formative years in exclusionary regimes. The intuition behind this expectation was that inclusionary regimes are better at creating general regime support of citizens by a wider redistribution of political and economic resources. Furthermore, we also expected to observe within-regime differences in political attitudes, as citizens who were part of the winning group of autocracy are less satisfied with democracy than members of the losing group.

These expectations were tested using HAPC models with harmonized public opinion data, regime data from V-Dem, and ethnic group data from the Ethnic Power Relations data. The results support our contention that people who were socialized in exclusionary regimes are more supportive of democracy compared with citizens socialized in inclusionary regimes, and even democracies. Also, we find that citizens who are part of the winning group in an autocracy are less satisfied with democracy compared with citizens who were part of discriminated groups. We interpret these democratic attitudes as an indicator about the nostalgia for the old authoritarian regime.

This study offered a micro perspective of authoritarian politics by examining the governance strategies used to build a loyal citizenry. Furthermore, it showed the long-term effects of authoritarian politics and their legacy long after the regime has collapsed. These results indicate that we should pay more attention to the role of ordinary citizens in autocracies and that political attitudes toward democracy are shaped long before citizens even experience democracy.

Supplemental Material

Appendix_Social_base_FINAL – Supplemental material for How Do Inclusionary and Exclusionary Autocracies Affect Ordinary People?

Supplemental material, Appendix_Social_base_FINAL for How Do Inclusionary and Exclusionary Autocracies Affect Ordinary People? by Anja Neundorf, Johannes Gerschewski and Roman-Gabriel Olar in Comparative Political Studies

Supplemental Material

Neundorf_replication_materials – Supplemental material for How Do Inclusionary and Exclusionary Autocracies Affect Ordinary People?

Supplemental material, Neundorf_replication_materials for How Do Inclusionary and Exclusionary Autocracies Affect Ordinary People? by Anja Neundorf, Johannes Gerschewski and Roman-Gabriel Olar in Comparative Political Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks for helpful comments to Editors Ben Ansell and David Samuels, several anonymous reviewers, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Natasha Ezrow, the workshop participants at the 2017 ECPR Joint Session Workshop “The Legacy of Authoritarian Regimes—Political Culture, Institutions, and Democratization” (University of Nottingham), and the participants of the “Virtual Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes” (VWAR): Holger Kern, Charles Crabtree, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Jonathan Hanson, and Nikolay Marinov. We further thank the audience members at MPSA 2017; Humboldt University; Science Po, Paris; University of Reading; Bocconi University; University of Glasgow; and Trinity College Dublin for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of the article.

Author’s Note

Anja Neundorf is currently affiliated with University of Glasgow, UK.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research of this article was generously funded by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—Secondary Data Analysis Initiative Project: “The Legacy of Authoritarian Regimes on Democratic Citizenship” (code: ES/N012127/1).

ORCID iD

Anja Neundorf

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online at the CPS website .

Notes

Author Biographies

Anja Neundorf is a profesor in Politics and Research Method at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK (since August 2019). Before she held positions at the Universities of Nottingham and Oxford. Her research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, political behavior and research methods.

Johannes Gerschewski is a research fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)” and at the “Global Governance” department at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Before he held positions at Humboldt-University Berlin and Technical University Munich. His research interests lie in democratic and autocratic theory, questions of regime legitimacy, and comparative democratizations.

Roman-Gabriel Olar is an assistant professor of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He obtained his PhD in Government in 2018 from the University of Essex. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative authoritarianism, state repression and spatial econometrics.

References

Acemoglu

Robinson

R. R.

(2006). Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Almond

Verba

(1963). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Anderson

C. J.

Guillory

C. A.

(1997). Political institutions and satisfaction with democracy: A cross-national analysis of consensus and majoritarian systems. American Political Science Review, 91, 66-81.

Ansell

B. W.

Samuels

D. J.

(2014). Inequality and democratization: An elite-competition approach. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bartels

Jackman

(2014). A generational model of political learning. Electoral Studies, 33, 7-18.

Bernhard

Karakoç

(2007). Civil society and the legacies of dictatorship. World Politics, 59, 539-567.

Boix

(2003). Democracy and redistribution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bueno de Mesquita

Smith

Siverson

R. M.

Morrow

J. D.

(2003). The logic of political survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Coppedge

Gerring

Lindberg

S. I.

Skaaning

S. E.

Teorell

Altman

. . . Zimmerman

(2018). V-Dem Codebook v8. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. Retrieved from https://www.v-dem.net/en/reference/version-8-apr-2018/

10.

Dinas

Northmore-Ball

(2020). The ideological shadow of authoritarianism. Comparative Political Studies, 53(12), 1957-1991.

11.

Easton

(1965). A systems analysis of political life. New York, NY: John Wiley.

12.

Fienberg

S. E.

Mason

W. M.

(1979). Identification and estimation of age-period-cohort models in the analysis of discrete archival data. Sociological Methodology, 10, 1-67.

13.

Fuchs-Schündeln

Schündeln

(2015). On the endogeneity of political preferences: Evidence from individual experience with democracy. Science, 347, 1145-1148.

14.

Gandhi

(2008). Political institutions under dictatorship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

15.

Geddes

(1999). What do we know about democratization after twenty years. Annual Review of Political Science, 2, 115-144.

16.

Geddes

Wright

Frantz

(2014). Autocratic breakdown and regime transitions: A new data set. Perspectives on Politics, 12, 313-331.

17.

Geddes

Zaller

(1989). Sources of popular support for authoritarian regimes. American Journal of Political Science, 33, 319-347.

18.

Haber

Menaldo

(2011). Do natural resources fuel authoritarianism? A reappraisal of the resource curse. American Political Science Review, 105, 1-26.

19.

Hadenius

Teorell

(2007). Pathways from authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy, 18, 143-157.

20.

Haggard

Kaufman

R. R.

(2016). Dictators and democrats: Masses, elites, and regime change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

21.

Hainmueller

Kern

H. L.

(2009). Opium for the masses: How foreign media can stabilize authoritarian regimes. Political Analysis, 17, 377-399.

22.

Jennings

M. K.

(1989). The crystallization of orientations. In Barnes

S. H.

van Deth

J. W.

Jennings

M. K.

(Eds.), Continuities in political action (pp. 313-348). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter.

23.

Karp

Banducci

Bowler

(2003). To know it is to love it? Satisfaction with democracy in the European Union. Comparative Political Studies, 36, 271-292.

24.

Kim

Gandhi

(2010). Coopting workers under dictatorship. The Journal of Politics, 72, 646-658.

25.

Krieckhaus

Son

Bellinger

N. M.

Wells

J. M.

(2013). Economic inequality and democratic support. The Journal of Politics, 76, 139-151.

26.

Krosnick

J. A.

Alwin

D. F.

(1989). Aging and susceptibility to attitude change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 416-425.

27.

Kuran

(1997). Private truths, public lies: The social consequences of preference falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

28.

Lindberg

S. I.

(2016). Ordinal versions of V-Dem’s indices: When interval measures are not useful for classification, description, and sequencing analysis purposes. Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, 8, 76-111.

29.

Linde

Ekman

(2003). Satisfaction with democracy: A note on a frequently used indicator in comparative politics. European Journal of Political Research, 42, 391-408.

30.

Lipset

S. M.

(1960). Political man. London, England: Heinemann.

31.

Lührmann

Tannenberg

Lindberg

S. I.

(2018). Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening new avenues for the comparative study of political regimes. Politics and Governance, 6(1). Retrieved from https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/1214

32.

The Maddison-Project. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm

33.

Magaloni

(2008). Credible power-sharing and the longevity of authoritarian rule. Comparative Political Studies, 41, 715-741.

34.

Mannheim

(1928). Das Problem der Generationen. Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie, 7, 157-184, 309-330.

35.

Mason

K. O.

Mason

W. M.

Winsborough

Poole

(1973). Some methodological issues in cohort analysis of archival data. American Sociological Review, 38, 242-258.

36.

Mueller

Neundorf

(2012). The role of the state in the repression and revival of religiosity in Central Eastern Europe. Social Forces, 91, 559-582.

37.

Neundorf

(2010). Democracy in transition: A micro perspective on system change in post-Soviet societies. The Journal of Politics, 72, 1096-1108.

38.

Norris

(1999). Critical citizens: Global support for democratic government. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

39.

Pop-Eleches

Tucker

(2017). Communism’s shadow: Historical legacies and contemporary political attitudes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

40.

Pop-Eleches

Tucker

(2020). Communist Legacies and Left-Authoritarianism. Comparative Political Studies, 53(12), 1861-1889.

41.

Rose-Ackerman

(1996). Democracy and “grand” corruption. International Social Science Journal, 48, 365-380.

42.

Schedler

(2013). The politics of uncertainty: Sustaining and subverting electoral authoritarianism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

43.

Sears

D. O.

Funk

C. L.

(1999). Evidence of the long-term persistence of adults’ political predispositions. The Journal of Politics, 61, 1-28.

44.

Sears

D. O.

Valentino

N. A.

(1997). Politics matters: Political events as catalysts for preadult socialization. American Political Science Review, 91, 45-65.

45.

Svolik

M. W.

(2012). The politics of authoritarian rule. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

46.

Vogt

Bormann

N. C.

Rüegger

Cederman

L. E.

Hunziker

Girardin

(2015). Integrating data on ethnicity, geography, and conflict: The ethnic power relations data set family. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59, 1327-1342.

47.

Wagner

A. F.

Schneider

Halla

(2009). The quality of institutions and satisfaction with democracy in Western Europe—A panel analysis. European Journal of Political Economy, 25, 30-41.

48.

Wang

C.-C.

(2017). Political socialization and democratic beliefs change: A panel study of Chinese students studying in Taiwan. Democratization, 24, 138-156.

49.

Wells

J. M.

Krieckhaus

(2006). Does national context influence democratic satisfaction? A multi-level analysis. Political Research Quarterly, 59, 569-578.

50.

Yang

Land

K. C.

(2006). A mixed models approach to the age-period-cohort analysis of repeated cross-section surveys, with an application to data on trends in verbal test scores. Sociological Methodology, 36, 75-97.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

6.98 MB

0.00 MB

1.04 MB