Research - 20.08.2025 - 08:30
Do citizens living under authoritarian rule see their country’s elections as fair or biased? In Turkey, for example, the government under President Erdogan has systematically undermined opposition forces while it continues to hold multi-party elections. In theory, these elections could still lead to a change in power, even if the odds are stacked against the challengers.
This paradoxical situation is known as electoral authoritarianism, and until recently, little was known about how ordinary citizens in such systems view their elections.
In a recent British Journal of Political Science article “Living in Different Worlds: Electoral Authoritarianism and Partisan Gaps in Perceptions of Electoral Integrity,” Paula Windecker (Johannes Gutenberg University), Ioannis Vergioglou (University of St. Gallen), and Marc S. Jacob (University of Notre Dame) tackle this question head on. The research looks not at what outside observers think, but how citizens themselves perceive the fairness of elections—and how those views differ between supporters of the government and the opposition.
The researchers wanted to understand things from the perspective of citizens. In electoral authoritarian regimes, the regime’s survival depends not just on repression, but on a large share of the public believing the system is legitimate. The question is who believes this, and why? The team suspected that political loyalty plays a decisive role, especially in environments where the media is heavily skewed toward the ruling party and dissent is risky. But they also wanted to compare authoritarian settings with democracies, to see whether the partisan divide is fundamentally different.
Across global survey data from over 100 countries, government supporters in electoral autocracies were more likely to believe elections were fair compared to opposition supporters—by about 8 percentage points. In democracies, the gap was much smaller, roughly 2–3 points.
In democracies, losers may grumble, but both sides tend to have some baseline trust in the electoral process. Under authoritarianism, supporters and opponents have opposing beliefs on the legitimacy of their democracy.
Using a decade of Gallup World Poll data, countries that shifted from democracy toward authoritarianism were tracked and the results found that opposition supporters became steadily more sceptical about elections as the system eroded. On the other hand, government supporters did not change their views at all.
In other words, when the quality of democracy declines, only one side updates its opinion. The incumbent’s base becomes increasingly convinced that elections are fair, regardless of the evidence.
Why groups continue to back ruling parties during autocratization remains a key question. Thestudy does not address it directly, but the literature suggests several mechanisms:
First, state-controlled, heavily propagandized media shape information and narratives. In recent years this extends beyond traditional media to new media.
Second, a bandwagon or “winner’s” effect, common even outside autocracies, encourages voters to side with those seen as victorious.
Third, clientelism offers material benefits to some incumbent supporters, making their optimism about the “system” partly grounded in personal gain. Finally, fear of persecution, especially among opposition voters or ethnic minorities, may suppress honest responses in surveys. Consequently, opposition views on electoral fairness and democracy are likely even bleaker than surveys suggest.
To test short-term effects, the study zoomed in on Turkey’s surprise announcement of snap elections in April 2018. Despite dominating the news and sharply increasing the visibility of electoral politics, the announcement barely moved public opinion on electoral fairness.
Government supporters became slightly more positive about having a “genuine choice” in elections, but opposition supporters’ views didn’t change. This suggests that perceptions are stable in the short term and driven more by long-term loyalties than by campaign-season events.
The size of the partisan gap under authoritarianism was striking. The team expected some difference, but the stability of government supporters’ trust—even as democracy declines—really shows how resilient political loyalty can be.
The cross-country data covers electoral authoritarian regimes around the world, including Malaysia, Nicaragua, Russia, and several African states, alongside democracies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. This allowed the authors to see whether patterns were universal or context-specific. The clear result was that the partisan gap is a consistent feature wherever competitive authoritarianism exists.
In the US and some other democracies, recent years have seen deepening partisan divides over election legitimacy, most visibly in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election. It is important to underline that democratic institutions generally keep the gap smaller, persistent refusal to accept electoral losses can mimic authoritarian-style divides.
This is where the findings become relevant beyond authoritarian regimes. If one side consistently distrusts elections and the other sees them as legitimate, even democratic systems can face dangerous polarisation.
Distrust in elections is often a symptom of authoritarianism, and widening partisan gaps are certainly indicative of trouble for countries that hold regular and (at least partly) fair elections. Imagine a scenario in which the electoral body simply does not agree on the process, let alone policy. In extreme scenarios this could (and has in the past) lead to political violence. For the purposed of comparison and research, the level of democracy (or authoritarianism) is better quantified through the study of the institutional-political system of a country, and the evaluation of their legislative, executive, and judicial power, and the extent to which they are independent with each other and come about through democratic means.
The most advanced research project for the quantification of levels of democracy across the globe is V-DEM, which also includes multiple dimensions and understandings of democracy, such as electoral democracy, participatory democracy, liberal democracy etc. In practice, a fully democratic country scores very high on all dimensions, but there are interesting insights to be found, nonetheless.
HSG author Ioannis Vergioglou is a political scientist focused on public investment policy evaluation and optimization and a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science (IPW-HSG). His focus is on European politics, public policy evaluation and predictive modelling.
