What Drives Authoritarian Regime Support? A Macro-level Study About the Relationship Between Performance and Authoritarian Regime Support

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes have always acted differently than their counterpart, democracies. For democracies, performance is a very important metric once it is time for reelection. On the other hand, autocrats don’t have to worry about losing an election. Their main fear is losing power through a coup d'etat or revolution. Because of this, authoritarian regimes have had to use violent and manipulative tactics in order to keep power. More recently, the biggest and most powerful authoritarian regimes have transitioned from traditional tactics such as violence to a more modern and technological approach. They now rely on using disinformation, misinformation, and having complete control over the news and media. Finding approval ratings and attitudes towards democracies is easy to access, but authoritarian regimes have a different set of rules. What are the true attitudes towards authoritarian regimes? This paper offers a quantitative approach at the macro level to see what are the main drivers of authoritarian regime support. Using data from the World Values Survey, I attempt to find relationships between different performance metrics, between both economic and public goods, and authoritarian regime support. Since my results suggest that there is a weak relationship between performance and authoritarian regime support, there is an underlying or unknown factor that drives support, or autocrats’ new methods to keep control are incredibly effective.