Regime Supporters Research Articles

Cultural Censorship and Institutional Trust in Africa

What are the consequences of cultural censorship on trust? Previous literature on institutional and political trust informs this article which extends the work to consider the importance of artistic spaces for shaping political attitudes. These spaces may allow individuals to form trust relationships with each other. The importance of these cultural spaces is highlighted when, in both democracies and autocracies, we observed cultural censorship. While the rationale for censorship may differ across regime types, some of the effects look strikingly similar. Using survey data from the Afrobarometer and measures of censorship from Varieties of Democracy, this article suggests that trust in executive and legislative institutions among regime supporters is increased, when autocracies engage in cultural censorship. Additionally, this article argues that trust in the ruling party increases and trust in the opposition party decreases with more cultural censorship in both autocracies and democracies. Taken together this descriptive initial test of the theory, consistent with the theory presented, offers additional insights about how authoritarian regimes might use cultural censorship to maintain system support, but also suggest reasons why even democratic regimes can be motivated to engage in censorship for political gain.

Defensive national identity relates to support for collective violence, in contrast to secure national identity, in a sample of displaced Syrian diaspora members

This paper examines national identities and collective violence beliefs in a sample of Syrian diaspora members (N = 521). Most of the Syria diaspora fled the ongoing civil war and are therefore opposed to President Assad and his regime, which still control most of their homeland. It is therefore a compelling question if national identities, which remain strong in the diaspora despite displacement, shape attitudes towards the regime at home. To this end, we contrast national narcissism (i.e., defensive national identity), an exaggerated belief in one’s national ingroup’s greatness, and national identification (i.e., secure national identity), a feeling of belonging to the nation and evaluating it positively, as differential predictors of collective violence beliefs. We find that a defensive national identity was related to support for both upward (i.e., violence targeted at regime leaders) and diffuse (i.e., violence targeted at regime supporters) collective violence. Meanwhile, secure national identity was linked to opposition to diffuse collective violence and was unrelated to upward collective violence. Thus, in a sample of displaced, non-WEIRD people, a pattern often found in similar research in the West is replicated, in that secure national identity can relate to benevolent and peaceful group processes. Meanwhile, national narcissism seems to be a driver of hostile intergroup attitudes. National sentiments should therefore be central in any discussion on diasporic attitudes towards the Syrian homeland’s regime and fellow citizens. The results could be utilised in designing interventions to promote harmony in diaspora communities around the world, and ultimately reconciliation once peace is finally restored.

Human Rights and Transitional Justice in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis of the Socio-Economic Profile and Education of Military Regime Supporters

Human Rights and Transitional Justice in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis of the Socio-Economic Profile and Education of Military Regime Supporters

Does Election Fraud Erode Support for Autocrats?

Does election fraud erode support for dictators? An original survey experiment from Russia following the 2020 vote on constitutional amendments reveals three key findings. First, regime supporters and opponents differ significantly in their baseline beliefs about election fairness. While regime opponents are already aware of fraud, supporters expect relatively fair elections. Consequently, only regime supporters revise their election beliefs when exposed to fraud information. Second, fraud revelations reduce regime legitimacy beliefs, but only among the regime’s political base. In contrast, regime opponents already perceive the regime as illegitimate at the baseline. Third, the experiment shows minimal, if any, effects on attitudes toward Putin. While fraud revelations cause regime supporters to adjust their views on the regime, their opinions about Putin remain largely unaffected. The findings imply that dictators can maintain popular support among their political base while manipulating elections, posing questions about the potential of fraud to undermine regime stability.

Politics of Vengeance in Iranian Diaspora Communities

The death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, on September 16, 2022 following her arrest by Iran's now-suspended Gasht-i Irshad (guidance patrol or morality police) for apparent lax conformity to the Islamic dress code ignited protests across Iran. The protests, known as Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Azadi) quickly spread to Iranian diaspora communities across North America, Europe, and Australia. Initially, diasporic Iranians organized their protests to support and amplify their compatriots’ calls for justice. As the protests continued in Iran and the demands for change grew louder, some members of the Iranian diaspora shifted their focus from the Islamic Republic to the public shaming of Iranians living outside Iran for their purported support of the Iranian regime. Some of the tactics employed by those engaged in public humiliations of suspected regime supporters recalled Gasht-i Irshad's methods of trapping and accosting individuals for perceived infractions. These public confrontations were aimed at isolating, shaming, and silencing perceived allies of the Islamic Republic and, by extension, denouncing the regime for its abrogation of women's and human rights. I refer to this phenomenon among diasporic Iranians as gasht-i intiqām, roving avengers, which reflects a frustration with the absence of justice in Iran and targets purported proxies for the regime. There have been many instances and types of denunciations aimed at silencing and ostracizing individuals, academics, and institutions. As Daniel Block points out in his analysis, “The attacks overwhelmingly target women, most notably in North America and Europe. The victims include gender equality activists, journalists, foreign policy analysts and a historian, each of whom has been accused of colluding with the authoritarian Islamist regime in Tehran.” Block further points out that many of the attacks are anonymous or originate from fake social media accounts. The common denominator he finds among those who target individuals is opposition to “Western-Iranian diplomacy or reporting information that adds subtlety to the debate over how the United States and its allies should handle the Islamic Republic.”1 Often those deemed regime collaborators are Iranian American individuals, journalists, or institutions that supported the 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the nuclear deal.

Lukashenka’s Constitutional Plebiscite and the Polarization of Belarusian Society

Aliaksandr Lukashenka pushed through an overhaul of Belarus’s constitution as a response to the protests against the official results of the 2020 presidential election. The goal was to address the desire for change among the population without reacting to the demand for snap elections. With the February 2022 constitutional plebiscite on the most far-ranging changes to Belarus’s constitution since 1994, Lukashenka further entrenched himself in power. The results of our online survey suggest that the constitutional changes do not meet the broad societal demand for political change and, in particular, for constraints on presidential power. Despite the persistence of the political conflict, we also show that Lukashenka’s supporters and opponents are not irreconcilably polarized in every policy domain. Finally, our results suggest that regime supporters have stronger anti-democratic preferences than opposition supporters when it comes to future political participation of the two camps, making the effects of affective polarization highly asymmetrical.

Parabureaucracy: The case of Mexico's “Servants of the Nation”

AbstractIn the context of limited state capacity and a politicized public administration, democratic backsliding tends to exploit preexisting deficiencies in the functioning of the public sector. Whereas staffing managerial positions with regime supporters is well‐documented, less attention has been paid to the structuring and staffing of street‐level bureaucracies under a spoils system. In this article, we use document analysis and in‐depth interviews to analyze the case of Mexico's “Servants of the Nation” —a group of more than 19,000 former party members and sympathizers hired by the government to perform street‐level tasks— as an example of “parabureaucracy”: an auxiliary street‐level organization designed to perform a wide variety of tasks directly related to the executive's political agenda. We argue that parabureaucracies are designed to sideline formal administrative command structures for the benefit of the government in power but may also serve as a means to bypass stifled and dysfunctional traditional bureaucracies.

Demolition and Discontent: Governing the Authoritarian City

AbstractThe presence of large cities increases the probability of authoritarian breakdown, but the literature has offered little empirical insight as to how challenges to authoritarian rule develop in urban space. I develop a theory of cities as complex sociopolitical spaces that are difficult to govern, particularly in the absence of democratic institutions. This complexity makes both co‐optation and coercion difficult, meaning the very tactics that authoritarian cities use to control discontent can become its proximate cause. Using a large, city‐financed housing project in Moscow targeted at rewarding regime supporters, I utilize a Bayesian semi‐parametric model to demonstrate that even a seemingly well‐targeted co‐optive exchange contributed to a surprising defeat for the regime in a subsequent municipal election. My results suggest that the relative illegibility of cities plays an important part in the development of opposition to authoritarian rule.

Engaging the next generation: authoritarian regimes and their young diaspora

Recent scholarship on diaspora engagement and transnational repression has investigated how authoritarian regimes seek to engage, govern and control their diasporas. Recognizing that diasporas are diverse and that homeland states thus devise different strategies in relation to different groups, this research has—to a large extent—focused on the varied positions held by regime supporters and dissidents. Inter-generational differences, however, have not been studied in this context. Drawing on established frameworks theorizing extraterritorial authoritarian practices, this article explores the ways in which second-generation diaspora—or diaspora youth—is either included as subjects, patriots and clients, or excluded as outlaws and traitors by authoritarian regimes. Drawing on the literature on transnationalism and second-generation migrants, and using examples from empirical cases, we argue that the skills, resources and multi-sited embeddedness of the second-generation diaspora can make them particularly interesting targets for transnational engagement—or repression. We draw attention to specific strategies for mobilizing the support of diaspora youth, but also note that some techniques to control or repress extraterritorial subjects are less efficacious in relation to this generation.

Joining forces: Social coalitions and democratic revolutions

When are mass protest movements able to overthrow authoritarian regimes and promote democratic transitions? This article considers whether socially diverse protest movements are more conducive to democratization than movements restricted to one or a few social groups. Coalitions across social groups should impose higher costs on authoritarian regimes through access to a wide range of resources, strategies and sources of leverage. Heterogenous protest coalitions are also more likely to socially overlap with regime supporters and the security forces, which should encourage regime splits and defections. But, diverse protest movements may also be more vulnerable to fragmentation and in-fighting, which may particularly threaten prospects of democracy in the aftermath of an authoritarian regime breakdown. Analyzing new global data mapping the social group composition of anti-regime protest campaigns from 1900 to 2013, the article finds consistent evidence that socially diverse protest movements are more likely to overthrow authoritarian regimes, and this is not driven by protest size. Socially diverse movements are also more likely to end in the short- and long-run establishment of more democratic institutions, suggesting that heterogenous protest movements’ potential for bringing about democracy is more promising than expected. These findings speak to the importance of securing broad and not only large mass movements to promote democracy.

Stability through constraints: the impact of fiscal rules on autocratic survival

ABSTRACT A growing literature has investigated the role that formal and informal economic institutions play for autocratic survival. However, this literature has, so far, ignored a type of formal economic institution that has grown in importance among both democracies and non-democracies in recent decades, namely, national fiscal rules. In this article, we argue that fiscal rules can affect autocratic survival but that the effect is time-dependent. The introduction of a stricter fiscal rules framework causes short-term fiscal retrenchment and might increase the uncertainty among regime supporters about the provision of future patronage and spoils. However, stricter fiscal rules also improve long-term fiscal management and, thus, increase investor confidence and economic performance in the long run. Consequently, fiscal rules stabilize autocratic regimes in the long run but not in the short run. Fixed-effect estimations on a panel of autocracies from 1987 to 2016 provide substantial evidence in favour of this argument.

Civic Duty and Voting under Autocracy

This article explores the duty to vote under electoral autocracy. Using original survey data from Russia, I present evidence that most voters feel an ethical obligation—a civic duty—to vote. I suggest that the duty to vote under autocracy is rooted not in norms of democratic participation but rather in reverence for the state. Because autocratic regimes often penetrate and politicize the state, I argue that opposition voters are less likely to revere the state and less likely than regime supporters to believe that voting is a civic duty. Using a previously validated measure of the duty to vote, I find evidence in Russia consistent with these arguments. The theory and findings suggest that authoritarian incumbents have an inherent mobilizational advantage: their supporters feel a duty to vote, but regime opponents do not. This may help explain why opposition parties under autocracy find it hard to turn out their supporters.

The role of the local government in China's urban sustainability transition: A case study of Wuxi's solar development

Recent studies on socio-technical transition have elaborated the multi-level perspective through a power-sensitive view of agency and a symmetrical approach to niche-regime relations. This paper adopts this modified framework of the multi-level perspective to unpack the mechanisms of urban sustainability transition in China. It develops two arguments through a case study of the role of the local government in solar development in Wuxi city. First, the evolving alignments between niche, regime and landscape processes of the socio-technical systems of Chinese cities are mediated by conflicts between local governments and their upper-level counterparts as they share power over urban development. Second, instead of being identified as either regime supporters or niche advocates, Chinese local governments are best described as embodying both roles in urban sustainability transition as they struggle to balance their economic and environmental objectives. These two arguments point to a need to examine sustainability transition in Chinese cities with attention to the leadership of the local government in aligning the actions of various actors in and beyond the city who can stabilise and disrupt existing socio-technical configurations.

How Repression Affects Public Perceptions of Police: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Uganda

What are the effects of state repression on public perceptions of police? And to what extent are these effects uniform or conditional on individuals’ loyalty to political authorities? I argue that repression by the police negatively affects how people evaluate the police, especially among those who do not support the ruling party. People who oppose the regime are more likely to fear the police following a repressive event relative to regime supporters. To test this argument, I leverage a unique research design opportunity that emerges from the social media tax protest led by Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu (also known as Bobi Wine) and subsequent selective repression by the Uganda Police Force while a nationally representative survey on police and security was being administered in Uganda. I demonstrate selective repression of protesters decreased support for the police. These effects are largely driven by political loyalty; repression has a stronger effect on how members of the opposition evaluate the police relative to incumbent supporters.

Electoral Manipulation and Regime Support

ABSTRACTDoes electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests in part on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment conducted after the 2016 elections in Russia, the authors find that voters withdraw their support from ruling party candidates who commit electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Revealing that fraud has occurred significantly reduces their propensity to support the regime. The authors’ findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest, but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect free and fair elections, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.

Legitimate Political Demands? How Young Russians of Different Political Orientation Assess Protests

Abstract Popular unrest is a source of worry also for seemingly stable authoritarian regimes. Young faces have become the image of protest in Russia over the last two years, and they convey the importance of protests that may emerge in any authoritarian regime. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what kind of young people are taking to the street and how their mobilisation is judged by their peers. This paper draws on survey data from 2018 and 2019 on the political attitudes of young Russians alongside focus group interviews generated in 2019 in Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg. The combination of these two sources allows us to explore the shifting assessments of political and environmental protests and young people’s participation therein. It is argued that young Russians of different political orientation agree that Putin has been in power for too long and that also regime supporters do not, in principle, oppose regime critical protests. Rather, supporters insist on the importance for protests to be officially approved but question the genuine political nature of oppositional mobilisation. Friendship networks and institutional trust emerge as the key variables for understanding assessment of protests.

How biased media generate support for the ruling authorities: Causal mediation analysis of evidence from Russia

If a medium has a monopoly in covering political news and daily distorts the news in favor of the ruling autocrat, how large will the persuasion effect be? Through which channels will such persuasion operate most? Working with a representative sample of the Russian population, I use a causal mediation analysis to explore whether (1) frequency of exposure and/or (2) reliance on biased reporting mediate the link between how people voted for incumbent elites and how they evaluate these elites in the present. Perceiving explicitly biased information as credible transmits a large and robust effect from voting to evaluation, while frequent exposure to this information produces an insignificant mediating effect. Another important finding is that the effect of perceived news credibility overrides the effect of previous electoral support: Accepting state propaganda as credible information converts people into regime supporters even if they did not support these elites at previous election.

The role of domestic factors on the failed transition to democracy in Egypt

This paper focuses on the roles of the domestic factors on the failed transition to democracy in Egypt. Domestic factors had an important impact on the authoritarian regime and established order in Egypt. The defenders of the established order had gotten much income from the authoritarian regime, yet many people had gotten less income from the state. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, the internal dynamics in Egypt Arab Spring served not to change the balances in the Middle East, but to the continuation of the institutional order (the established order). The domestic factors such as social, political, and economic factors were the reasons for the uprising. The former regime supporters regained power by the military coup d’état with financial and political support from global actors.

Civic Duty and Voting under Autocracy

This paper explores the duty to vote under electoral autocracy. Using original survey data from Russia, I present evidence that most voters feel an ethical obligation---a civic duty---to vote. I suggest that the duty to vote under autocracy is rooted not in norms of democratic participation, but rather in reverence for the state. Because autocratic regimes often penetrate and politicize the state, I argue that opposition voters are less likely to revere the state and less likely than regime supporters believe that voting is a civic duty. Using a previously validated measure of the duty to vote, I find evidence in Russia consistent with these arguments. The theory and findings suggest that authoritarian incumbents have an inherent mobilizational advantage: their supporters feel a duty to vote, but regime opponents do not. This may help explain why opposition parties under autocracy find it hard to turn out their supporters.

Cui Bono? Business Elites and Interstate Conflict

We address how regime supporters affect war-making by re-opening a classic debate on business elites and their influence on states' conflict behavior. Imperialist theories contend that business elites encourage executives to undertake military expeditions to open up foreign markets, while capitalist peace arguments emphasize that business elites have economic incentives to work for peace. We synthesize these arguments and propose that countries become more belligerent, in general, when business elites enter regime support coalitions, but not towards other business-supported regimes. We use recently compiled data on social groups in regime support coalitions, covering 200 polities across 1789-2018, to test implications of our argument. We find that business-supported regimes are more likely to initiate armed conflict, but not against other countries with business-elite supported regimes. We also find support for additional implications, for instance pertaining to how the belligerence of business-supported regimes depends on existing trade relationships.