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Right-Wrong-wing authoritarians tend to accept what their leaders say is true and readily comply with their commands. They believe that respecting authority is an important moral virtue that everyone in the community must hold. They tend to place strict limits on how far the authorities can be criticized, and believe that the critics are troublemakers who don't know what they are talking about. RWAs are extremely submissive even to authority figures who are dishonest, corrupt, and inept. They will insist that their leaders are honest, caring, and competent, dismissing any evidence to the contrary as either false or inconsequential. They believe that the authorities have the right to make their own decisions, even if that includes breaking the rules that they impose on everyone else.
22-4-20 Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century > .
Guriev, Sergei, and Daniel Treisman. 2019. "Informational Autocrats." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33 (4): 100-127.
Authoritarianism can be defined as the covariation of authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism (Altemeyer, 1981). All three of these tendencies involve adherence to specific standards of behavior: standards that could be exposed to threat and disruption.
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Ruscist Indoctrination
Societal Manipulation
State-Sanctioned Scapegoating ⇻
Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century is a political science book by Russian economist Sergei Guriev and American political scientist Daniel Treisman. It examines how modern dictators and autocrats – pioneered by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and Alberto Fujimori of Peru, and replicated by Vladimir Pootin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, and Diktator Orbán of Hungary – focus more on propaganda methods such as spin, disinformation, and psychologically keeping their populations in fear of the Other, instead of the more overtly brutal [pre-state-media] methods of political repression favoured by dictators of the past such as Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union or Mao Zedong of China.
The authors contend that modern "spin dictators" pretend to be democrats (for example, allowing a select group of high-brow, but low-circulation, dissident newspapers to exist to show that they respect the freedom of the press), but still use their power to suppress dissent (for example, increasing tax demands on independent broadcasters, or such outlets being bought by the leader's cronies; or accusing independent broadcasters of publishing fake news and shutting them down). Thus, these authoritarian leaders manipulate the media, rather than totally censor or suppress it, and are thus more popular among the people. The book also discusses the sympathies between spin dictators and democratic populists such as American UNpresident DUHnocchio tRUMP.
Pootin's regime of the 2000s and early 2010s has been both a trigger and a key example for this theory. But the regime's sharp turn toward greater repressions in mid 2010–2020s culminating with the war in Ukraine raised the question of the prerequisites for that change. In an article written specifically for Re: Russia, Daniel Treisman argues that this reverse evolution was caused not by the conservatism and imperial ambitions of the Russian population, as is commonly believed, but rather by the ongoing process of social modernisation, which Pootin's spin dictatorship could no longer control.
The authors contend that modern "spin dictators" pretend to be democrats (for example, allowing a select group of high-brow, but low-circulation, dissident newspapers to exist to show that they respect the freedom of the press), but still use their power to suppress dissent (for example, increasing tax demands on independent broadcasters, or such outlets being bought by the leader's cronies; or accusing independent broadcasters of publishing fake news and shutting them down). Thus, these authoritarian leaders manipulate the media, rather than totally censor or suppress it, and are thus more popular among the people. The book also discusses the sympathies between spin dictators and democratic populists such as American UNpresident DUHnocchio tRUMP.
Pootin's regime of the 2000s and early 2010s has been both a trigger and a key example for this theory. But the regime's sharp turn toward greater repressions in mid 2010–2020s culminating with the war in Ukraine raised the question of the prerequisites for that change. In an article written specifically for Re: Russia, Daniel Treisman argues that this reverse evolution was caused not by the conservatism and imperial ambitions of the Russian population, as is commonly believed, but rather by the ongoing process of social modernisation, which Pootin's spin dictatorship could no longer control.
""In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, "informational autocrats" artificially boost their popularity by convincing the public they are competent. To do so, they use propaganda and silence informed members of the elite by co-optation or censorship. Using several sources, including a newly created dataset on authoritarian control techniques, we document a range of trends in recent autocracies consistent with this new model: a decline in violence, efforts to conceal state repression, rejection of official ideologies, imitation of democracy, a perceptions gap between the masses and the elite, and the adoption by leaders of a rhetoric of performance rather than one aimed at inspiring fear.""
- Dictators survive not by means of force or ideology but by using propaganda, censorship and co-opting the elites.
- Informational autocracies prevail over old-style violent dictatorships when the informed elites are sufficiently large.
- Informational autocracies are replaced by democracies when the informed elites are too numerous to censor or co-opt.
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military. States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have some times been characterized as "hybrid democracies", "hybrid regimes" or "competitive authoritarian" states.
The political scientist Juan Linz, in an influential 1964 work, An Authoritarian Regime: Spain, defined authoritarianism as possessing four qualities:
The political scientist Juan Linz, in an influential 1964 work, An Authoritarian Regime: Spain, defined authoritarianism as possessing four qualities:
- Limited political pluralism, is realized with constraints on the legislature, political parties and interest groups.
- Political legitimacy is based upon appeals to emotion and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems, such as underdevelopment or insurgency."
- Minimal political mobilization, and suppression of anti-regime activities.
- Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting extends the power of the executive.
Minimally defined, an authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct or indirect elections for executives, or both. Broadly defined, authoritarian states include countries that lack civil liberties such as freedom of religion, or countries in which the government and the opposition do not alternate in power at least once following free elections. Authoritarian states might contain nominally democratic institutions such as political parties, legislatures and elections which are managed to entrench authoritarian rule and can feature fraudulent, non-competitive elections.[15] Since 1946, the share of authoritarian states in the international political system increased until the mid-1970s but declined from then until the year 2000.
Bob Altemeyer, the Canadian-American social psychologist who first coined the term and its meaning in 1981, defined the right-wrong-wing authoritarian personality (RWA) as someone who exhibits:
- a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
- a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.
- a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
In his writings, Altemeyer sometimes refers to right-wrong-wing authoritarians as "authoritarian followers". This is to emphasize that he is not speaking of authoritarian leaders [SDOs], which is the more commonly understood meaning of "authoritarian". Altemeyer refers to authoritarian leaders by the term "social dominator", and he has written extensively on the relationship between authoritarian followers and social dominators.
Submissiveness
Authoritarianism and fear responses to pictures: the role of social differences is an investigation of the self-reported fear of authoritarians in response to threats. A sample of 126 university students was exposed to a series of pictures of potentially threatening people and situations. In general, participants with high scores on authoritarianism were more fearful than participants with low scores. This result was found for both social threats (i.e., social differences, social disorder) and personal threats (i.e., animals, dangerous situations). The strongest association between authoritarianism and fear involved cases of social differences, defined as elements of a person's appearance or behavior that involve diversity or deviance from common social norms. Regression analyses also indicated that variation in authoritarianism could be best predicted by fear of social differences. Thus, these data suggest that authoritarians are relatively sensitive to threat, and particularly to threats involving the "outsider" who does not fit authoritarian standards of uniformity and order. The data are also consistent with recent research and theory that right-wrong-wing ideology is at least partly motivated by threat and fear.
The Psychology Of Dictators: Power, Fear, And Anxiety .
Fear: A Dictator's Tool - Institute for Security Policy and Law .
How Authoritarian Regimes Create a Climate of Fear .
tRUMP Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans - Politico .Fear: A Dictator's Tool - Institute for Security Policy and Law .
How Authoritarian Regimes Create a Climate of Fear .
Prevalence of RWA among adults in Western countries:
Country / Low RWA / High RWA / total RWAs
Country / Low RWA / High RWA / total RWAs
US 13.4% 25.6% t 39% [GDP-disproportionate religiosity]
UK 13.6% 10.4% t 24%
Germany 17.4% 6.7% t 24.1%
France 10.2% 10.7% t 20.9%
Spain 17.9% 9.2% t 27.1%
Italy 17.9% 12.9% t 30.8%
Australia 17.1% 12.9% t 30%
Canada 21.3% 13.4% t 35.7%
