Identifying Partisan Efforts to Generate Authoritarian Legitimacy

Abstract

Informed by the puzzle of differentiating between democratic and authoritarian legitimacy-generating actions, the chapter aims to propose and test a theoretical tool for measuring partisan efforts to generate a regime’s legitimacy. The study contributes theoretically to our understanding of generating a regime’s legitimacy by modifying and combining the theories of mind engineering and ideology-based education. The modification departs from normative significance-based evaluation of mind engineering consequences. This feature of mind engineering is replaced with a type of political system to capture what ideology it instills. Also, the chapter proposes sensitive criteria for differentiating between democratic and authoritarian frames. A methodological contribution lies in offering and testing a theory-based tool useful to unpack cognition- and behavior-oriented claims to democratic and authoritarian legitimacy. The new empirical approach uncovers the mechanisms of mind engineering aimed at influencing cognitive and behavioral aspects of the public’s involvement in supporting political systems.