Culture and Democracy: Predicting Authoritarianism and Ethnonationalism with Social Axioms

Abstract

Authoritarian leaders and parties are challenging the foundations of democracy across the world. We argue that this authoritarian upsurge is systematically linked to culturally shared beliefs about the world. Study 1 linked social axioms to authoritarianism and ethnonationalism in a US college sample. Study 2 replicated these findings with a multi-national dataset and predicted authoritarianism with country-level social axioms. Results from these two individual-level studies indicated that right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and ethnonationalism were related to reward for application, religiosity, and fate control, but low social flexibility. Left-wing authoritarianism was linked to high levels of social cynicism, and fate control, but inversely related to the other three axioms. Countries with high dynamic externality had weaker democracies, as evident in fewer civil liberties and worse political culture, and a greater prevalence of individual-level authoritarian and ethnonationalist sentiments. We discuss the implications of the relationship between authoritarianism and culture in this current democratic backsliding, and the susceptibility of different cultures to the lure of illiberalism.

Keywords:

• Social axioms
• culture
• authoritarianism
• ethnonationalism
• democracy
• multi-level modeling

Data availability

Data and codes can be found here: https://osf.io/ecx4u/?view_only=e448c0a53d0845a49336df0f0a9883f7.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Notes

1 We relied on a student sample because we were mainly interested in testing our hypotheses about the linkages between the measured constructs (see our hypotheses). Note that student samples tend to be less diverse than nationally representative samples or samples collected using Amazon Mturk (Kalmoe, 2020). However, they tend to be knowledgeable about politics than the general population, and more likely to identify with a particular ideological position (e.g., Jost, 2006; Kalmoe, 2020). To the extent knowledge qualifies the association between constructs, we expect our research to slightly overestimate the correlations one can expect to find in the general population (cf. Judd & Krosnick, 1989; Kalmoe, 2020). However, there is no reason to expect the nature of relationships to vary between students and the general population.

2 The original three-item religiosity scale produced the same substantive findings as the two-item scale.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Waleed A. Jami

Waleed A. Jami is a graduate student working toward his PhD from the University of Nevada, Reno in social psychology. His research takes on an interdisciplinary approach in examining the intersection between cultural and political psychology, and the relationship between democracy and political beliefs and behaviors.

Markus Kemmelmeier

Markus Kemmelmeier received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2001 in social psychology. He is currently director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Social Psychology and a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research interests focus on cultural psychology, political psychology, intergroup relations and statistical methods in the social sciences.