The appeal of electoral autocracy: Assessing citizens' revealed societal preferences

Are citizens willing to trade democratic institutions and practices for more authoritarian alternatives? If so, what do they prioritize and why? We investigate this experimentally by exposing over 35,000 respondents from 32 different countries -- both democracies and autocracies -- to a series of hypothetical countries, asking them to choose the country they would prefer to live in. We vary the following attributes of the countries: the presence of (various) democratic practices, cultural-social characteristics, and economic and physical security. Based on this, we investigate expectations on how citizens may trade democracy against economic and physical security. We find that citizens are highly committed to free and fair elections. However, many citizens are willing to trade executive constraints to gain economic prosperity. These results are mostly uniform across various country- and individual-specific characteristics. Hence, citizens appear to value what the typical electoral autocrat claims to provide: elected leaders and (economic) safety.