According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. Recent cross-national evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but there are inferential limitations associated with that evidence. We report two studies that address some of these limitations, and provide further tests ...

the last decade of the twentieth century saw the rise of a great number of regimes that cannot be easily classified as either authoritarian or democratic but display some characteristics of both—in short, they are semi-authoritarian regimes. They are ambiguous systems that combine rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy, the existence of some formal democratic institutions, and respect for a...

Building on the work of S. M. Sales, who related contemporaneous economic threat to authoritarian behaviors, two studies tested the hypothesis that threat is associated with relatively more attraction to authoritarian churches and less attraction to nonauthoritarian churches. The hypothesis was supported in Study 1, when the annual percentage of changes in memberships (1928-1986) for two author...

A maternal authoritarian style has been related to the development of physical aggression during childhood and later future social problems; however, not too many studies have detected other than individual or family factors that may buffer this maternal effect. This work examines whether daycare center attendance may moderate the relationships between a mother authoritarian style and physical ...

This study examined authoritative and authoritarian parenting and specific parenting practices among Chinese mothers with preschoolers. The final sample consisted of 463 mothers with their 3 to 7 year-olds from 11 preschools, in Taiwan. Mothers completed a Chinese translation of the Parenting Behavior Questionnaire that assessed their parenting practices. Findings indicated that the subscales o...

According to survey results, almost all over the world – even in most authoritarian states – the support for democracy is nowadays relatively high. However, skeptical opinions exist about the substantial foundations of these attitudes. While a lot of studies about the MENA-region deal with determinants of the consistency of authoritarian regimes, only a few studies have been conducted on the de...

This article develops and tests a reformation of Baumrind's typology of authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative parenting styles in the context of adolescent school performance. Using a large and diverse sample of San Francisco Bay Area high school students (N = 7,836), we found that both authoritarian and permissive parenting styles were negatively associated with grades, and authoritativ...

While constitutions regulate political authority within a state, there is much we do not know about the interaction between political conditions and constitutional texts. Much of the literature relies upon hand-coded databases of constitutional texts. However, this approach raises both methodological and theoretical concerns. Advances in natural language processing, particularly latent text ana...

This paper examines how authoritarian legislative institutions affect regime survival. I argue that authoritarian legislatures and party systems, even when devised to quell threats from authoritarian rivals, can influence the distribution of power in a subsequent democracy. When legislative institutions and party systems help protect the interests of authoritarian elites in new democracies, the...