Political Attitudes towards Strongman-Centered Governance in Europe: Individual and Country-Level Factors

Data from the 2017-2020 EVS/WVS surveys demonstrate that people who hold a positive attitude towards strongman-centered governance are present in each of the 38 countries surveyed, with the ratios ranging from 9% in Greece to 81% in North Macedonia. A series of multilevel ordinal logistic regression models demonstrated the statistically significant effects on this attitude for individual as well as country-level factors. A more positive/less negative attitude towards strongman-centered governance is characteristic for men, for younger respondents, for the less educated, for those living in less populated settlements and for more religious respondents. At the country level, a more positive attitude towards a strongman political system is characteristic for countries that are more authoritarian according to several V-Dem indices, for economically less advanced countries, and for countries with less pronounced emancipative values. To double-check these results, we analyzed the attitude towards democratic political system in the same European countries. The effects were found to be corroborating the main findings. Regression analysis showed the effects of all the predictors except gender and religiosity on the attitude towards democratic political system to have the expected opposite direction to the effects on the attitude towards strongman-centered governance.