Misperceptions and Demand for Democracy under Authoritarianism

This paper investigates whether enduring authoritarian regimes are in part rooted in the population’s misperceptions about their social and economic costs—as opposed to a general preference for authoritarianism. We explore this question using online and field experiments in the context of Türkiye’s May 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections. We confirm that voters, especially those supporting the incumbent authoritarian government systematically underestimate the extent to which democracy and media freedom have been eroded in Türkiye and their usefulness in dealing with natural disasters and corruption (two salient issues in Türkiye). We find that providing (accurate) information about the state and implications of democracy and media freedom have significant effects on beliefs and increase the likelihood of voting for the opposition by about 3.7 percentage points (6.2 percent) in the online experiment. In the field experiment, we estimate similarly-sized impacts on the ballot-box level vote share—with the information treatment leading to a 2.4 percentage point (4.4 percent) increase in the opposition’s vote share. Interestingly, both in the field and online, the results are driven not by further mobilizing opposition supporters, but by influencing those likely to vote for the governing coalition and those holding more misperceived beliefs about democracy and media freedom in Türkiye. The evidence suggests that at least part of the support for authoritarian regimes may be coming from misperceptions about their institutions and policies, and may be more malleable than typically presumed.