Deep Roots of Support for Unconstrained Leadership: Evidence from Second-Generation Immigrants and Ancestral Pastoral Organization

Why do some individuals express stronger support for unconstrained leadership? This paper argues that preferences over executive constraints may partly reflect durable cultural legacies of historical social organization. I focus on pastoral nomadic societies, where political authority often relied on mobility, bargaining, and redistributive brokerage rather than dense impersonal institutions. To study this question, I combine World Values Survey data with ethnographic and spa- tial measures of pre-industrial social organization and focus on second-generation immigrants, which allows comparisons among individuals exposed to the same host-country institutions but differing in ancestral origins. I map respondents’ self-reported ethnic identities to Ethnographic Atlas societies, use matched loca- tions as proxies for ancestral homelands, and construct ancestry-linked measures of nomadic exposure: an Ethnographic Atlas nomadic social-organization indica- tor, proximity to reconstructed Eurasian nomadic corridors, and a model-based measure of relative nomadic pastoralism suitability. The latter is constructed from the standardized difference between land suitability for nomadic pastoral- ism and land suitability for agriculture around ancestral homelands, and then re-standardized so that higher values indicate environments relatively more favorable to nomadic pastoralism than to sedentary agriculture. I first show in pre-industrial Ethnographic Atlas validations that the corridor and ecological proxies are positively associated with the incidence of nomadic social organiza- tion. In the contemporary analysis, all ancestry-linked measures are positively associated with support for “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” The results are robust to host-country and survey-year fixed effects, ancestral-region fixed effects, rich individual and ancestral controls, and appendix robustness checks using an alternative 100km ecological buffer.