Authoritarianism and information processing

Information, Closeness of Elections and Authoritarianism

Often democracy is defeated by democratically elected leaders who pursue undemocratic policies. The present contribution seeks to explain how information can a¤ect the danger of incompetent or populist politicians being elected into o¢ ce. It is shown with the help of a voting model that both the proportion of informed voters in a society and the state of the economy matter for determining who ...

Threat, Authoritarianism, and Selective Exposure to Information

We examined the hypothesis that threat alters the cognitive strategies used by high authoritarians in seeking out new political information from the environment. In a laboratory experiment, threat was manipulated through a “mortality salience” manipulation used in research on terror management theory (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003). Subjects (N = 92) were then invited to read one of t...

Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism

There has been a long history of work on authoritarianism that has looked at the role of societal threat. Much of the empirical research in this tradition has relied on aggregate data to examine the relationship between societal threat and authoritarian attitudes and behaviors. Our analysis uses individual-level data and a range of perceived threat measures to better understand the dynamics of ...

Information Technology: Weapon of Authoritarianism or Tool of Democracy?

Strong tendencies exist to apply information technology to support centralist, authoritarian world views. It is argued that alternative architectures can be readily created, which are more attuned to the openness and freedoms which are supposed to be the hallmarks of democratic government. It is questioned whether authoritarianism will be capable of surviving the complexities, dynamism and wide...

Authoritarianism and race attitudes in South Africa.