Endogenous Popularity: How Perceptions of Support Affect the Popularity of Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Autocracies with popular leaders tend to survive longer. A growing body of scholarship therefore focuses on the factors that influence authoritarian popularity. However, it is possible that the perception of popularity itself breeds popularity in nondemocratic regimes, impacting incumbent approval. Here we use framing experiments embedded in four recent surveys in Russia to examine the extent to which information about the support an authoritarian leader enjoys influences the level of support respondents report for him. We find that negative information about the Russian president's popularity decreases support for him, while positive information has no effect. Additional analyses, which rely on a novel combination of framing and list experiments, provide evidence that these changes are not due to preference falsification. This study has implications for research on the origins of incumbent approval and dramatic defection cascades in nondemocratic regimes.