The most common form of democratic collapse in the 21st century is not the military coup. It is the election. Since the 1990s, executive takeovers by elected leaders have surpassed armed seizures of power as the leading cause of democratic breakdown, according to research by Yale political scientist Milan Svolik. The strongman arrives not in a tank but on a ballot, and the psychology of strongman appeal is now one of the most studied questions in political science.
This pattern is now global. The V-Dem Institute’s 2025 Democracy Report found that 45 countries are actively autocratizing, up from 12 two decades ago, and that autocracies now outnumber democracies worldwide for the first time since 2002. The question is no longer whether democracies can produce authoritarians. It is why they keep doing it.
The answer lies less in economics than in psychology. Decades of cross-national research point to a set of cognitive and emotional mechanisms that, under the right conditions, make strongman appeal not just tolerable but genuinely attractive to democratic electorates.
The Authoritarian Predisposition Is Always There
Political psychologist Karen Stenner’s landmark work, The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005), demonstrated that roughly a third of the population in Western democracies carries an innate predisposition toward authoritarianism. This is not an ideology. It is a psychological orientation: a deep preference for social uniformity and group conformity over individual autonomy and diversity.
Stenner drew a crucial distinction that most political commentary still misses. Authoritarianism is not conservatism. Conservatism resists change over time. Authoritarianism resists difference across people. A conservative wants things to stay the same. An authoritarian wants everyone to be the same. The two orientations overlap in practice but are driven by fundamentally different psychological engines.
The critical insight is that this predisposition is normally dormant. It activates under perceived threat, particularly when people sense that social cohesion is fracturing, that public opinion is deeply divided, or that established norms are dissolving. Stenner’s research showed that the more ideological distance authoritarians perceived between themselves and others, the more intolerant and punitive they became.
It Is Not About the Economy
The popular explanation for authoritarian voting is economic anxiety: people lose their jobs, feel left behind, and vote for a strongman who promises to fix it. The evidence says otherwise.
Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 that tracked a nationally representative panel of 1,200 American voters surveyed in both 2012 and 2016. She found that change in personal financial wellbeing had no measurable impact on candidate preference. Voters whose finances deteriorated were no more likely to switch to an authoritarian-leaning candidate than those whose finances improved.
What did predict the shift was perceived status threatIn political psychology, the perception by members of a dominant social group that their relative standing is being challenged by other groups — shown to predict authoritarian voting more reliably than economic hardship.. Voters who believed that white people were discriminated against more than Black people, that Christians faced more discrimination than Muslims, and that men were treated worse than women were the most likely to shift their support toward the candidate who emphasized restoring traditional hierarchies. Once these attitudes were accounted for, education level, which many analysts treated as a proxy for economic grievance, lost its predictive power entirely.
Mutz’s conclusion was direct: the vote was “an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance,” driven by anxiety about future status rather than any past economic injury.
Partisanship Overrides Democratic Principles
Even voters who value democracy in the abstract will sacrifice it for partisan advantage. Svolik’s survey experiments, conducted across Venezuela and seven European countries, presented voters with a choice between two candidates: one who shared their economic preferences but proposed anti-democratic reforms, and one who did not. The result was consistent. A majority of respondents were unwilling to vote against the anti-democratic candidate when doing so would mean betraying their economic or partisan interests.
The more intense the partisanship, the worse the trade-off became. Strongly partisan voters stuck with the authoritarian-leaning candidate regardless of the democratic cost. Only moderate, less ideologically committed voters consistently punished anti-democratic behavior, even at personal cost.
This finding has a structural implication: polarization does not just make politics unpleasant. It actively disables the primary democratic safeguard, which is the electorate’s willingness to vote out leaders who undermine democratic norms. In a polarized society, the public cannot function as a check on authoritarianism because partisans will not defect.
The Generational Shift
There is also the question of whether younger citizens still believe democracy is worth defending. Political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk’s research on “democratic deconsolidationThe gradual weakening of a population's commitment to democracy, marked by declining belief in its necessity, growing openness to authoritarian alternatives, and rising anti-system voting.,” published in the Journal of Democracy, found that across established democracies in North America and Western Europe, the percentage of citizens who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has dropped significantly, with the steepest declines among younger generations.
This is not merely anti-government sentiment or healthy skepticism about institutions. Foa and Mounk’s framework measures three dimensions: how important citizens consider democratic governance, how open they are to nondemocratic alternatives (including military rule), and whether anti-system parties are gaining support. On all three dimensions, the trend lines in consolidated democracies have moved in the wrong direction.
The significance is not that younger voters are becoming fascists. It is that democratic legitimacy can no longer be assumed as a background condition. When a generation grows up viewing democracy as one option among several rather than as a non-negotiable foundation, the political space for strongman appeal expands.
How Strongman Appeal Closes the Deal
The psychological research converges on a pattern. Authoritarian leaders do not succeed by arguing against democracy directly. They succeed by doing five things simultaneously.
First, they amplify perceived threat. The threat can be cultural (immigration, demographic change), institutional (corrupt elites, rigged systems), or existential (national decline, civilizational collapse). The content matters less than the emotional register: fear that the in-group is losing ground.
Second, they offer simplicity. Complex problems with structural causes are reframed as betrayals by identifiable enemies. This satisfies what Stenner identified as the authoritarian craving for “oneness and sameness,” a world without ambiguity.
Third, they position themselves as the sole remedy. The strongman is not a policy platform. The strongman is the policy. Trust in the leader substitutes for trust in institutions.
Fourth, they exploit partisan loyalty. As Svolik’s research shows, once voters are sorted into hostile camps, democratic norms become expendable luxuries that partisans cannot afford.
Fifth, they redefine democratic language. Authoritarian leaders rarely reject democracy. They claim to represent the “real” people against corrupt institutions, reframing their consolidation of power as democratic renewal rather than democratic erosion.
The Structural Trap
None of this requires a population that wants dictatorship. It requires only a population that is sufficiently threatened, polarized, or disengaged to tolerate democratic erosion in exchange for other priorities. The V-Dem data confirms that this is not a regional anomaly. Freedom of expression is deteriorating in 44 countries simultaneously, the highest number ever recorded. Political polarization is increasing in roughly a quarter of all nations, and more than half of those polarizing countries remain, for now, democratic.
The uncomfortable conclusion from the political psychology literature is that the same cognitive biases that make humans vulnerable to doomscrolling and threat-based media also make democratic electorates vulnerable to authoritarian capture. Strongman appeal is not an aberration. It is a feature of human psychology that democratic institutions must perpetually work to contain. When those institutions weaken, when polarization deepens, when perceived threats multiply, the predisposition activates across large portions of the electorate.
Democracy does not die because citizens choose tyranny. It dies because enough citizens choose something else, partisan victory, cultural security, economic interest, status preservation, and accept democratic erosion as the price.
The Authoritarian Predisposition: Stenner’s Framework
Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge University Press, 2005) established the interaction model that dominates contemporary political psychology of authoritarianism. Her central contribution was demonstrating that authoritarian attitudes are not fixed traits expressed uniformly. They are latent predispositions activated by environmental conditions, specifically perceived normative threatIn political psychology, the perception that shared social norms, values, or group cohesion are dissolving, which activates latent authoritarian predispositions in susceptible individuals..
Stenner distinguishes authoritarianism (preference for uniformity in people and beliefs at a given moment) from conservatism (preference for stability over time), treating them as psychologically distinct orientations that are empirically separable. Her data showed that approximately one-third of Western populations carry the authoritarian predisposition, with roughly 50% heritabilityA statistical measure of how much variation in a trait within a population is explained by genetic differences. A heritability of 50% means genes account for half the variation in risk., suggesting a substantial genetic component.
The activation mechanism is specific: perceived loss of normative order, particularly deep public dissensus and loss of confidence in leaders, triggers the shift from latent predisposition to active intolerance. Stenner’s research demonstrated that “the more ideological distance authoritarians perceived between themselves and [others], the more prejudiced, intolerant, and punitive they become.” This interaction effect means that the same individual can appear tolerant in stable conditions and deeply authoritarian under perceived threat.
Status ThreatIn political psychology, the perception by members of a dominant social group that their relative standing is being challenged by other groups — shown to predict authoritarian voting more reliably than economic hardship. vs. Economic Anxiety: Mutz (2018)
Diana Mutz’s 2018 PNAS study (“Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote”) used a nationally representative panel of 1,200 American voters surveyed in both 2012 and 2016 to test competing explanations for authoritarian voting.
Key findings: change in personal financial wellbeing had no measurable impact on candidate preference between survey waves. Job losses between 2012 and 2016 showed no correlation with vote switching. Education’s predictive value, widely cited as evidence for the “left behind” thesis, disappeared entirely once attitudes toward racial diversity and group dominance were controlled for.
The strongest predictors of vote switching were perceived status threats among traditionally dominant groups: voters who believed whites faced more discrimination than Black people, Christians more than Muslims, and men more than women. Mutz concluded that the vote represented “an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance” rather than a response to material deprivation.
A methodological note: Stephen Morgan (2018) published a response in Socius challenging some of Mutz’s analytical choices. Mutz responded, and the debate illustrates the difficulty of disentangling status threat from material interest in observational data. The weight of evidence, however, supports status threat as the stronger predictor.
The Partisan Override: Svolik’s Experimental Evidence
Milan Svolik’s experimental work addresses the mechanism by which authoritarian erosion survives democratic elections. His conjoint survey experiments, conducted in Venezuela and across seven European countries, presented voters with candidate pairs differing in both policy positions and democratic commitments.
The core finding: a majority of respondents declined to vote against an anti-democratic candidate when doing so required sacrificing their economic or partisan preferences. Willingness to tolerate authoritarian behavior increased monotonically with partisan intensity. Only moderate, weakly partisan voters consistently imposed democratic constraints on their vote choice.
Svolik’s work identifies two structural “reservoirs of tolerance for authoritarianism” across European democracies: the illiberal right and the politically disengaged. The implication is that democratic resilience depends on a sufficient mass of centrist voters willing to cross partisan lines to defend democratic norms, precisely the demographic that polarization erodes.
This connects to the broader finding that since the 1990s, executive takeovers have replaced military coups as the primary mode of democratic collapse, a shift that requires explaining why electorates fail to prevent the erosion they can observe.
Democratic DeconsolidationThe gradual weakening of a population's commitment to democracy, marked by declining belief in its necessity, growing openness to authoritarian alternatives, and rising anti-system voting.: Foa and Mounk
Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk’s work on “democratic deconsolidation” (Journal of Democracy, 2016) proposed a three-factor framework for measuring democratic stability beyond institutional design: citizen support for democracy as a system, openness to nondemocratic alternatives, and the electoral strength of anti-system movements.
Their data showed declining support for democracy as “essential” across established Western democracies, with the steepest declines among younger cohorts. This pattern was observable in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden. Some subsequent analyses (e.g., Zilinsky 2019 in Research & Politics) have challenged the magnitude of the youth effect, arguing that survey methodology and question wording may inflate the apparent generational gap. The broader trend of declining democratic satisfaction, however, has been replicated across multiple datasets.
The deconsolidation framework’s value is in shifting analysis from institutional resilience (constitutions, courts, militaries) to attitudinal resilience: the willingness of citizens to actively defend democratic norms when they are tested. As the history of LysenkoismThe doctrine that organisms can acquire traits from their environment and pass them to offspring — a rejection of genetics that became a label for state-imposed scientific falsehood. demonstrated, the institutional capture of science required not just authoritarian will but mass acquiescence from citizens who chose ideological comfort over empirical reality.
The Global Picture: V-Dem 2025
The V-Dem Institute’s 2025 Democracy Report provides the empirical backdrop. Key data points: 45 countries are autocratizing in 2024 (up from 12 two decades ago). Autocracies outnumber democracies globally (91 to 88) for the first time since 2002. Freedom of expression is deteriorating in 44 countries, the highest figure ever recorded. Political polarization is increasing in roughly a quarter of all nations, with more than half of those polarizing countries still classified as democracies.
The global Liberal Democracy Index has declined to 1996 levels by country averages and to 1985 levels by population-weighted averages. By GDP-weighted averages, it has reached a 50-year minimum.
Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Central Asia show the most severe trajectories. India and Mongolia have been reclassified out of the democracy category. Counterexamples exist (Brazil and Poland have halted or reversed autocratizationThe process by which a country gradually moves from democracy toward authoritarianism through incremental erosion of norms, freedoms, and institutions rather than sudden takeover.), but they remain exceptions to a dominant global trend.
Synthesis: The Activation Cascade
The research converges on a causal sequence rather than a single cause. Latent authoritarian predispositions (Stenner) interact with perceived status threats (Mutz) in a polarized environment where partisan loyalty overrides democratic commitment (Svolik), against a backdrop of declining attitudinal support for democracy itself (Foa and Mounk). No single factor is sufficient. The combination is what produces the strongman appeal that the V-Dem data captures at scale.
The policy implications are uncomfortable. If authoritarian voting is driven primarily by perceived threat rather than material deprivation, then economic redistribution alone cannot address it. If partisan polarization disables the electoral check on authoritarianism, then institutional reforms that reduce polarization are more urgent than those that strengthen courts or constitutions. And if democratic support is eroding generationally, the timeline for intervention is shorter than the institutional data alone suggests.
Democracy does not require that citizens be immune to authoritarian impulses. It requires that institutions, norms, and sufficient electoral mass work together to contain those impulses when they activate. The current research suggests that all three containmentA foreign policy strategy of limiting an adversary's territorial or ideological expansion by maintaining pressure along its borders through alliances. mechanisms are weakening simultaneously, and strongman appeal is the predictable result.
