Fear predicts authoritarian attitudes across cultures, with conservatives most affected

A massive international study published in the Journal of Personality has found that people across the world are more likely to support authoritarian forms of government when they feel threatened by real-world dangers such as crime, poverty, or political instability. This pattern was observed across 59 countries, making it the largest cross-cultural test of its kind to date. The results also show that this relationship tends to be more pronounced among people who identify as politically right-leaning.

Authoritarianism, in psychological research, refers to a preference for strong leadership, strict social order, and obedience to authority, often at the expense of democratic principles like civil liberties and pluralism. The concept was originally developed in the aftermath of World War II to understand how ordinary people could come to support totalitarian regimes.

Over the decades, numerous theories have suggested that feelings of threat or insecurity—whether due to economic hardship, violence, or political upheaval—may trigger a psychological shift toward favoring more authoritarian governance. However, most previous research has been based on relatively small studies conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, raising concerns about whether the findings could be generalized to the rest of the world.

“There is a large literature on how authoritarianism rises from people feeling threatened, but that literature has focused almost entirely on conservatives in Western contexts. So my original inspiration was to evaluate the world-wide relationship between authoritarianism and threat for both conservatives and liberals,” said study author Lucian (Luke) Gideon Conway III, a professor at Grove City College and author of Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us About the Left’s Authoritarian Problem – And How to Fix It.

To address these gaps, Conway analyzed data from the World Values Survey, a long-running global research project that collects information on political beliefs, cultural values, and social attitudes from representative samples in dozens of countries. He selected over 20 survey items related to different kinds of realistic threats, including personal and family-level threats like food insecurity and lack of access to medicine, neighborhood-level dangers like crime and police intrusion, political threats like voter intimidation or media bias, and general worries about war, terrorism, or unemployment. These items were combined into a cumulative threat index.

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Authoritarianism was assessed using a scale measuring support for autocratic governance, asking respondents whether they favored leadership by a strongman, military rule, or technocratic decision-making without public input. Importantly, this scale is widely regarded as ideologically neutral, avoiding the bias seen in many earlier measures that equated authoritarianism with specific political ideologies.

The final sample included 84,677 people from 59 countries across six continents, with both WEIRD and non-WEIRD nations represented. Statistical models were used to assess whether perceived threat predicted support for authoritarian government while controlling for variables such as age, gender, education, income, and political ideology.

The results showed a consistent and robust association between threat levels and authoritarian attitudes. Individuals who reported greater personal, neighborhood, or political threats—or who simply expressed more general worry about threats—were more likely to support authoritarian forms of governance. This held true even after accounting for people’s political ideology or how extreme their views were. In other words, feeling threatened was linked to stronger support for authoritarian leadership regardless of whether someone identified as politically left or right.

However, Conway found that the effect of threat on authoritarianism was somewhat stronger among right-leaning individuals compared to those on the left. While threat predicted authoritarian attitudes across the board, it had a greater impact among conservatives.

The pattern also varied by cultural context. In WEIRD nations like the United States, Germany, and Sweden, the link between threat and authoritarianism was stronger than in many non-WEIRD countries. Still, every global region included in the analysis—ranging from South America to Sub-Saharan Africa—showed a statistically significant effect. This finding supports the idea that the psychological connection between threat and support for strong leadership is a broadly human one, not just a product of Western society.

“Across the world, people who report feeling threatened by things such as crime and poverty are more prone to want authoritarian leaders,” Conway told PsyPost. “That is true whether you are liberal or conservative, and it is true whether you live in a Western country (such as the United States or Western Europe) or a non-Western country. However, the authoritarianism-threat relationship is stronger for conservatives (versus liberals) and in Western (versus non-Western) countries.”

The findings support a “soft asymmetry” view by showing that realistic threats predict authoritarian attitudes across the political spectrum, but the effect is stronger among right-leaning individuals. This suggests that while both liberals and conservatives can become more authoritarian under threat, conservatives are more consistently responsive to such conditions.

“I have been a champion of what have come to be called ‘symmetrical’ theories of ideology,” Conway explained. “Those theories suggest that liberals and conservatives are psychologically similar but differ only in the content of their beliefs, and thus we would expect similar effects on both sides (hence the term ‘symmetrical’). However, the primary results for the threat-authoritarianism relationship around the world were not entirely symmetrical – they actually were larger for conservatives than liberals. Although the similarities are bigger than the differences, this gives pause to a pure symmetry theory.”

The study adds to a growing body of evidence that supports the theory that human psychology evolved to prioritize strong leadership during times of threat. A recent paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior also found that people in 25 countries were more likely to prefer dominant-looking leaders when they were asked to imagine a scenario involving war or international conflict. In that study, participants viewed faces manipulated to appear more or less dominant and consistently chose the more dominant face when under threat. The preference for dominance was found to be consistent across many countries, echoing the current study’s finding that perceived threat prompts people to favor authoritarian traits in leaders.

Despite its scale, the new study has limitations. Because the data come from a single wave of survey responses, the findings are correlational and cannot prove that threat causes authoritarianism. It is possible that people who already favor authoritarian government are more likely to perceive the world as threatening. Experimental studies in smaller samples have shown that manipulating threat can increase authoritarian attitudes, but the present data cannot make that claim directly.

“While my study is the largest individual-level analysis of this topic to date, it nonetheless only includes 59 nations,” Conway noted. “That’s a lot, but it isn’t the whole world. Also, we didn’t include any measurements about why this happens or what might cause things to shift from liberal-authoritarian threat to conservative-authoritarian threat.”

The study also focused exclusively on realistic threats—those that involve physical or economic harm. It did not test symbolic threats, which refer to challenges to a group’s cultural values or social identity. Some researchers argue that symbolic threats may be even more important in driving authoritarian attitudes, especially in politically polarized societies.

“I’d like to follow up with an even larger study that evaluates the authoritarian-threat link in liberals and conservatives over time,” Conway said. “For example, I suspect that liberals are more likely to be authoritarian when you have conservative governments established in power through democratic means (because they feel more threatened by their opponents having power), while the reverse is true for conservatives. This is a testable hypothesis, given enough data over enough time.”

The study, “Authoritarianism and Threat in 59 Nations,” was published May 26, 2025.