Event

Abstract:

In non democracies, such varied political acts as protest participation, voting for the opposition, and abstaining from supporting regime candidates entail risks. Yet risk attitudes have seldom been studied directly in authoritarian settings. This paper investigates how citizens’ attitudes toward risk shape political participation under authoritarian rule; it proposes a theory of how affective factors interact with an individual’s baseline tolerance for risk to explain risky political behavior—even when the strong organizational ties emphasized by exiting literature on high-risk participation are absent. Empirically, I test this argument using survey data from Russia on expressions of regime support (and evasive responding), voting behavior (including non-voting and opposition voting); and a survey experiment on willingness to protest after regime repression. This paper is the first to benchmark the predictive power of risk attitudes relative to other known determinates of regime support and voting behavior in an autocracy. It also contributes to our understanding of how ordinary citizens overcome a baseline aversion to political risk-taking.

Bryn Rosenfeld is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. Her research interests include political behavior, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology. Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2020) explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. Her other projects investigate the causes and consequences of participation in mass demonstrations, how economic performance affects the popularity of ruling parties in electoral autocracies, and howRussian media respond to government pressure.