Can Autocratizing Leaders Create Autocratic Publics?

• In Event: Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

What makes democracies vulnerable to would-be autocrats, and what accounts for their resilience? Ongoing debates concern the respective roles of the elites and the public: Does democracy erode from the top down or from the bottom up? Do would-be autocrats ride to power by capitalizing on preexisting popular support for authoritarian rule, or do they create this support along the way? Poland's episode of democratic backsliding between 2015 and 2023 presents an especially interesting case study: In the runup to 2015—the year in which the populist radical right came to power—the country was seemingly blessed with a set of social, economic and institutional circumstances that should have made democratic erosion highly unlikely in view of prevailing political science theories. Conversely, eight years later, having copied and implemented many practices from successful autocratizing leaders around the world, the populist radical right seemed destined to remain in power for decades to come. And yet it suffered a defeat at the polls. How can we account for its initial success and for its eventual failure? Drawing on individual-level data from the 2015, 2019, and 2023 Polish National Election Studies, this paper focuses on the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes of democratic erosion, and shows that autocratic elites play a key role in the creation of autocratic publics, but also demonstrates the limits of these efforts. Specifically, the paper examines the strength and over-time evolution of Polish voters’ democratic commitments, and the extent to which economic, sociocultural, psychological, and partisan-ideological factors played into their willingness to support democratic and non-democratic actors on the Polish political scene throughout the backsliding episode. The role of media and political communication receives special attention in the paper, whose main finding is that voters’ perceptions of social reality—and their preferences as to what should be done to address problems with that reality—are indeed malleable through sustained messaging by partisan-ideological actors, but not infinitely so.

Author

• Hubert Tworzecki, Emory University