Changes in Eastern and Western Europeans' Support for Authoritarian Values in Times of Insecurity, 2002-2014

According to modernization theory, economic development and rising levels of security have diminished the importance people attach to authority, absolute rules and order, while promoting values of individual autonomy and self-expression in advanced industrialized societies (Inglehart, 1997). However, the last decade has witnessed several developments that may have worked in the opposite direction, among which an economic recession and Euro-crisis, mass immigration and a series of terrorist attacks. These developments may have given rise greater economic and cultural insecurity, in turn increasing people’s support for authoritarian values (de Jonquières, 2017; Hetherington & Suhay, 2011; Inglehart & Norris, 2016; Miller, 2017). Previous research has shown that authoritarian values are related to a range of social and political attitudes and behaviours, such as nationalism and nativism; opposition to individual freedom, gay rights, and gender equality; negative attitudes towards ethnic outgroups; and voting for (right-wing) authoritarian populist parties (Feldman & Stenner, 1997; Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; Inglehart & Norris, 2016; Lubbers & Coenders, 2017; Rooduijn, 2014; Scheepers, Felling, & Peters, 1990; Vasilopoulos & Lachat, 2017). Increases in people’s support for authoritarian values may therefore have important consequences for the acceptance of differences and the future of democracy in European societies. However, it remains largely unknown whether people’s support for authoritarian values has indeed increased within European countries over the past decade as a consequence of changes in the economic, cultural and political context. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by investigating whether Europeans’ support for authoritarian values has changed over time, and if so, whether these changes can be explained by changes in societal insecurity. In addition, we test the generalizability of modernization theory by analysing whether the development of authoritarian values and its determinants differ between Western and Eastern European countries, as well as between different groups in society. Moreover, we analyse both rising levels and sudden changes in the societal context, as sudden changes or ‘shocks’ in certain indicators may exert a stronger influence on people’s attitudes and behaviour than customary levels of these same indicators (Olzak, 1992). We use seven rounds of the European Social Surveys covering the period between 2002-2014. We complement these data with national level indicators of economic, cultural and political conditions, such as GDP, unemployment, government debt, the percentage tertiary educated, the level of religiosity, immigration, and indicators of political stability retrieved from, among others, OECD and Eurostat. Support for authoritarian values is measured using a reliable scale (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.7) based on five questions of the Schwartz cultural value orientation scale. In order to test our hypotheses, we estimate multilevel regression models with 217,103 individuals nested in 124 country-year combinations for Western and Eastern European countries separately. We include levels of contextual indicators as well as changes herein, and we control for important individual characteristics and country dummies to account for the population composition and unobserved country characteristics. Moreover, cross-level interactions are estimated to analyse whether the economic, cultural and political context affects certain groups in society more than others.