The Ideological Shadow of Authoritarianism

• Author: Elias Dinas,Ksenia Northmore-Ball
• Date: 01 October 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414019852699
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019852699

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(12) 1957 –1991

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414019852699

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Article

The Ideological Shadow

of Authoritarianism

Elias Dinas1,2 and Ksenia Northmore-Ball3

Abstract

How do the labels left and right take on meaning in new democracies?

Existing explanations point to the universality of the left–right scheme or,

reversely, emphasize regionally dominant social cleavages. We propose an

alternative legacy-focused theory based on two observations: Dictatorships

are not ideologically neutral and are negatively evaluated by most citizens

and elites after democratization. These premises lead us to expect that when

the authoritarian regime is associated with the left (right), the citizens of a

new democracy will display an antileft (antiright) bias in their left–right self-

identification. We test this hypothesis across Latin American and European

new democracies. We find significant bias, which in the case of new

democracies following left-wing regimes is concealed due to intercohort

heterogeneity. Although older cohorts denote a positive bias, cohorts

born after Stalin’s era denote negative bias against the left. Consistent with

our expectations, repression exacerbates this bias whereas indoctrination

mitigates it. Finally, we look at how these biases apply to party preferences.

The findings have important implications for understanding authoritarian

legacies and party system development in new democracies.

Keywords

left–right, antidictator bias, indoctrination, postcommunism, Latin America

1European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy

2University of Oxford, UK

3Queen Mary University of London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Ksenia Northmore-Ball, School of Politics and International Relations Queen Mary, University

of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.

Email: k.northmore-ball@qmul.ac.uk

852699CPSXXX10.1177/0010414019852699Comparative Political StudiesDinas and Northmore-Ball

research-article2019

1958 Comparative Political Studies 53(12)

Party competition is almost unthinkable without a spatial representation of

both voters and parties along an ideological dimension (Brady, 2011).

Ideological classifications such as “left” and “right” help political parties

to brand (Lupu, 2013) and package (Zechmeister, 2006) policy proposals

and allow voters to cope with political issues in the context of imperfect

information (Downs, 1957), form political identities (Claassen, Tucker, &

Smith, 2015; Devine, 2015), and make political choices with limited

awareness of the actual party policy positions (Adams, Ezrow, & Somer-

Topcu, 2011). But, whereas parties’ long-run trajectories shape the sym-

bolic meaning of these ideological labels in established democracies

(Arian & Shamir, 1983; Knutsen, 1995), little is known about how these

terms are understood in new democracies. Existing explanations focus

either on the role of preexisting social cleavages (Evans & Whitefield,

1995; Kitschelt, 1995, 1999; Tucker, 2002; Whitefield, 2002) or on factors

that have emerged after the democratic transition: elite coordination

(Zechmeister, 2006), party system structuration (Harbers, de Vries, &

Steenbergen, 2013), and trust in political institutions (Doyle, 2011).

We take a different route. We draw on a distinguishing feature of these coun-

tries, namely the ideological connotations of their authoritarian past. The labels

left and right are not a monopoly of democratic party competition; on the con-

trary, the left–right (LR) scheme has played a central role for the nondemo-

cratic regimes of the 20th century. Even though fascism—a leading ideology of

the interwar period—lost significance after World War II (WWII), the Cold

War provided an unambiguous ideological context, leaving nondemocratic

regimes of the post-WWII period to orient themselves into pro- and anticom-

munist camps. These dynamics are not captured by the existing democratiza-

tion literature, which has mainly focused on how the institutional features of

nondemocratic regimes conditioned their transition to democracy (e.g., Boix &

Stokes, 2003; Brownlee, 2007; Gandhi, 2008; Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007;

Geddes, 1999; Hadenius & Teorell, 2007; Przeworski, 2000; Remmer, 1985;

Svolik, 2012). Few studies have looked at the ideological connotations of non-

democratic regimes (Gentile, 2013; Levitsky & Way, 2013; Linz, 2000) and

even fewer look at their legacies after democratization (but see Pop-Eleches &

Tucker, 2017; Torcal & Mainwaring, 2003). This lacuna is surprising given the

resources dictators dedicate to controlling political language and disseminating

the regime ideology. In this article, we directly address this gap by examining

whether and how the ideological connotations of autocracies color the meaning

of “left” and “right” in third-wave democracies in Latin America, Eastern

Europe, and Southern Europe. In doing so, we propose a new way of integrat-

ing the macrolevel understanding of regime types and the microlevel under-

standing of the formation of LR self-identification.

Dinas and Northmore-Ball 1959

We argue that, in new democracies, people’s willingness to classify

themselves as left-wing (LW) or right-wing (RW) is shaped by a general

reluctance to identify with the ideological label associated with the past

authoritarian regime. As a result, people in new democracies will place

themselves further away from the end of LR ideological spectrum associ-

ated with the prior regime than they would have otherwise. We call this

tendency antidictator bias. If the past regime was LW as in the case of

Eastern Europe, people will display an antileft bias, and if the prior regime

was RW as in the cases of Latin America and Southern Europe, people will

display an antiright bias.

We test our expectations with a harmonized data set which covers 50

countries, 950 country-years, and 2 million individuals. We contrast both

post-LW and post-RW new democracies against the ideological benchmark

provided by established democracies. We find evidence for persistent antidic-

tator bias in post-RW democracies and among the younger cohorts of post-

LW democracies. We also try to shed some light on the mechanisms, by

examining within-regime heterogeneity in the magnitude of the effects, con-

ditional on two key characteristics of authoritarian regimes: repression and

indoctrination. Our results highlight the importance of prior regime indoctri-

nation for explaining the strength of these biases. Communist indoctrination

in Eastern Europe had mitigating effects on antileft biases among older gen-

erations. Finally, shifting our attention from ideological self-placement to

party preferences, we find that in democracies following right-wing regimes,

right-wing parties are additionally “penalized” by opposing voters. In Eastern

Europe, we find that voters dislike all opposing parties equally, and do not

additionally penalize left-wing communist successor parties.

Our article makes contributions in three areas. First, we provide a parsi-

monious explanation for the cross-sectional variation in LR self-identifica-

tion in Europe and Latin America today. With respect to Europe, which

experienced both right- and left-wing dictatorships, our explanation goes a

long way in helping us understand cross-country variation in LR self-place-

ment, as depicted in Figure 1, which shows the average LR self-placement

for each country from the 2008 European Values Survey (EVS). Second, we

introduce ideological connotations of autocracies, as well as the modifying

impact of regime characteristics, such as repression and indoctrination, as

new variables for understanding the source of LR self-identification and

party competition in third-wave new democracies. Finally, we contribute to

the growing understanding of the malleability of attachments to political

“brands” (Lupu, 2013) and the symbolic functions of ideological labels both

as a short-cut for political choices and as a source of group identities. The

article makes a novel contribution to this extensive research by moving our