Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Education

Abstract

An empirical investigation of relevant data for 70 nations sought to find the meaning of authoritarianism and its possible relationships to dictatorial and antidemocratic political regimes. There were four levels of analysis. 1) Cross-national authoritarianism — the first problem investigated asked: Are there any measures of authoritarianism that are predictably different for different countries? If so, why do these differences exist? For this purpose, an estimate of authoritarianism scores was based on the results of 32 countries from which large numbers of authoritarianism data were available from a worldwide review. 2) State authoritarianism — next, a score for state authoritarianism was developed from these global indicators for some 70 selected countries. These included all the major countries on all continents. 3) Relationship between state authoritarianism and authoritarian attitudes — the state authoritarianism score was related to the previously developed estimate of authoritarianism levels in 32 countries. Surprisingly, both were highly correlated. 4) Preliminary analyses regarding causes of state authoritarianism — to understand the possible relationship between authoritarian attitudes and state authoritarianism, models were tested based on results of, and our experience with, 40 years of authoritarianism research. These models included independent global indicators of politics, economics, population (for example, density and urbanization), education, communications, ethnicity, the gender gap, military conflict, family-type, and religion. Conclusion and discussion — these models are presented and the most plausible explanations (in terms of the various guiding theories of authoritarianism) are discussed.