Authoritarian Governments

Socially conservative populists are most open to authoritarianism.

In “Who Is Open to Authoritarian Governance Within Western Democracies?” Ariel Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Bert N. Bakker and Eliyahu Spivack examined World Values Survey data from 14 Western democracies and separate polling from Canada and the United States:

“Two key findings emerged,” they wrote. “The first is that a broad conservative cultural orientation — involving traditional sexual morality and gender views, religiosity, anti-immigration attitudes and related beliefs and values — is consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance.”

The attraction of these voters to the MAGA movement, Malka and his co-authors argued, “suggests that authoritarian governance may be perceived as an efficient way of enforcing social conformity, upholding religious traditionalism and resisting multicultural diversity.”…

The second key finding is that “left-wing economic views are in many cases a part of the ideological package that most strongly resonates with openness to authoritarian governance”:

Specifically, the combination of right-wing cultural and left-wing economic attitudes — what has been dubbed a protection-based attitude package — was associated with higher levels of openness to authoritarian governance than was any other attitude package in half of the nations represented in the samples, including all five of the English-speaking democracies studied (Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the United States).

From here.