Authoritarianism and Culture

Abstract

Abstract Research on authoritarianism and culture highlights shared values, beliefs, behaviors, symbols, meanings, and affective orientations and considers how they shape and are shaped by the inception, resilience, functioning, and decline of autocratic rule. Reviewing scholarship on cases from around the world, the chapter traces how scholars increasingly shift away from older understandings of culture as a reified set of influences determining regime type and instead emphasize culture’s dynamic, intersubjective, and relational character. Some scholars treat culture as a contingent structure within which individual agency affects the likelihood of nondemocratic politics. Others track the cultural mechanisms through which autocrats establish rule and oppositionists challenge it. Still others consider how authoritarian power produces particular cultures which in turn reproduce authoritarian power, with legacies that sometimes outlast regimes themselves. This chapter considers what these wide-ranging works teach us about the complex linkages between authoritarianism and culture and suggests directions for new research.