New research published in American Political Science Journal This suggests that support for authoritarian leaders can be socially widespread among citizens of established democracies. Researchers found evidence that by exposing individuals to peers with different political views, people tend to adjust their preferences for the rule of the strong to match the attitudes of those around them. This social contagion effect provides insight into how anti-democratic sentiment can suddenly surge in modern societies.
The growing popularity of leaders who circumvent democratic institutions has led experts to examine how ordinary citizens form political preferences. In recent years, many modern democracies have seen a marked increase in public tolerance of authoritarian rule. This shift is often measured by observing people’s willingness to support strong leaders who ignore traditional democratic rules such as regular elections and parliamentary oversight.
Previous explanations for this trend have focused on broad structural conditions. Scholars often focus on economic instability, rising inequality, and cultural differences as key drivers of anti-democratic attitudes. Another common approach traces these views to deeply ingrained personality traits or early childhood education, suggesting that authoritarian thinking is relatively stable and unchanging.
The authors of the current study found a gap in these traditional explanations. “Many existing studies look at factors such as economic insecurity, ideology, personality, and upbringing to explain support for authoritarian rule,” said Andreas Kotsadam (@kotsadam.bsky.social), a senior researcher at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research and co-author of the study. He noted that the researchers wanted to know whether these preferences are socially formed, and whether people become more or less accepting of rule by the powerful depending on the opinions of those around them.
To explore this idea, the research team designed a series of ambitious field and survey experiments. Their goal was to separate the effects of social influence from other factors that might cause people with similar views to come together. In everyday life, individuals typically choose their friends and communities, so it is difficult to determine whether social groups share opinions because they influence each other or because they are naturally drawn to like-minded people.
To overcome this hurdle, researchers worked with the Norwegian military to conduct field experiments during an eight-week basic training camp. “The Norwegian military provided a very good opportunity to investigate this because recruits were randomly assigned to rooms and lived and worked closely with roommates during the eight-week recruit training period,” Kotsadam explained. This setting ensured that the configuration of each room was left entirely to chance.
On their first day of military service, more than 1,300 recruits completed a basic survey before receiving their room assignments. The survey measured initial support for authoritarian rule by asking people how strongly they agreed or disagreed with certain statements. The statement asked whether it was important to have strong leaders who get things done, even if it means bypassing Congress and elections.
Room assignments were randomized, so some recruits ended up living with colleagues who strongly supported authoritarian leadership. Others were placed with peers who strongly opposed it, and most were assigned to groups with moderate views. After eight weeks of sharing housing and cooperating with day-to-day tasks, the recruits completed follow-up. This follow-up assessment allowed the researchers to track how individuals’ attitudes changed after prolonged exposure to a particular social situation.
Statistical models reveal that new employees adapt their personal attitudes to match the average perspective of their roommates. Recruits randomly placed in rooms with high baseline support for authoritarian rule became significantly more supportive of strongman leadership by the end of camp. This effect was symmetrical, meaning that people placed in rooms with highly anti-authoritarian peers became more opposed to strong leaders over the same period of time.
To better understand how this postural transfer works, the team conducted a second experiment that was incorporated into a final survey given to recruits. They randomly divided participants into two groups and provided different but factually accurate summaries of their peers’ baseline survey responses. The goal was to see if simply learning about other people’s general opinions could directly cause a change in an individual’s political beliefs.
One group read aloud stating that authoritarianism was moderately popular among recruits, noting that only a few strongly disagreed with this statement. The other group received a message emphasizing that authoritarianism is somewhat unpopular, with more respondents disagreeing than agreeing with this statement. Following this informational prompt, recruits were again asked to state their preferences regarding strong leaders.
The data showed that reading about the prevalence of authoritarianism causes individuals to change their own reported attitudes in a corresponding direction. “I was shocked that the influence was not limited to people who were already sympathetic to authoritarian rule,” Kotsadam said. “Some participants who initially strongly rejected the idea of leaders bypassing parliaments and elections became more receptive when told that such ideas were relatively common.”
People who read that strong leaders are unpopular adjusted their opinions to be more anti-authoritarian, providing evidence that political preferences can be highly responsive to social cues. Kotsadam pointed out that information indicating that authoritarian views are unpopular moved attitudes in the opposite direction. He explained that social influence is not necessarily a one-way road to authoritarianism.
To test whether these findings apply outside the military context, the scientists replicated the survey experiment using a representative sample of 1,500 ordinary Norwegian citizens. In a recent poll, participants were asked similar questions about the popularity of strongman leadership. The control group answered the questions without receiving any prior information about other people’s opinions.
The results for the general population closely mirrored those from military recruits. When ordinary people were informed of the prevalence of authoritarian views, they reported higher levels of personal support for strong leaders. The researchers then conducted a final replication using a large cross-national sample of more than 25,000 respondents from over 29 countries. The results yielded the same pattern of social influence across diverse cultural backgrounds.
Kotsadam noted that one of the distinguishing features of the study was that it combined naturally occurring face-to-face social interactions with a more controlled research experiment. “While field experiments show that attitudes can converge between people who actually live together, survey experiments show that stated preferences can be changed simply by learning what others believe,” he told PsyPost. “More broadly, our findings suggest that the stability of a democracy depends not only on what citizens personally believe, but also on what their fellow citizens believe.”
The authors suggest that attitudes toward democracy and authoritarian rule are not necessarily fixed personal beliefs. “They can be influenced by the surrounding social climate,” Kotsadam says. He added that this raises the possibility that social influences will amplify authoritarian movements, but also provides grounds for optimism. “Making visible support for democratic principles may help strengthen those principles,” he explained.
One potential misconception of this research is the assumption that the exact psychological mechanisms behind postural changes are completely understood. “The word ‘contagious’ should not be interpreted to mean that authoritarianism automatically spreads, or that having one authoritarian friend will necessarily change someone’s politics,” Kotsadam clarified. He emphasized that researchers do not yet know how long the changes last, or whether they reflect adaptation, persuasion, learning, or a combination of these processes.
This field experiment involved young people in the unusually intensive environment of a military boot camp. This population group tends to be more sensitive and open to changing their worldview than older people. “It is also important to note that boot camp itself did not result in recruits becoming more authoritarian on average,” Kotsadam said, adding that this result was related to differences in the social environment that recruits happened to encounter within the boot camp.
Future research could extend these findings by following individuals over longer periods of time. “The next important step is to determine how long these effects last and whether they influence not only survey responses but also the resulting political behavior,” Kotsadam said. He added that the team would like to pinpoint the mechanism more precisely.
This may involve determining whether people conform to perceived social norms, inferring that widely accepted views must be valid, or being persuaded through argument. “Similar field experiments in workplaces, schools, communities, and online networks could help establish when social influences generate broader political cascades and when visible democratic norms can prevent them,” Kotsadam explained. Understanding the longevity of these attitudinal changes will provide greater insight into the broader stability of democratic societies around the world.
The study, “Is support for authoritarian rule contagious? Evidence from field studies and survey experiments,” was authored by Cillian Durham, Torbjörn Hansson, Øshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Alexander Wutke.
