Shoreline Publishing Group
Comparative Politics Series, Volume 1
Demanding
Strongmen
- Formats
- Hardcover, paperback
- Extent
- 247 pages, 7 × 10 in
- Published
- 2026
- ISBN
- 979-8-18609-735-8
Why do societies demand strongmen?
Across the world, authoritarian movements rarely rise by force alone. They are invited, defended, rationalized, and often demanded by citizens seeking order, identity, protection, and certainty in periods of instability.
Demanding Strongmen examines the relationship between values, insecurity, and the global appeal of authoritarian leadership. Drawing on four decades of cross-national survey data and the V-Dem regime record, Darin R. Molnar asks why democratic commitments weaken, why strongman politics becomes attractive, and how fear, status anxiety, cultural conflict, and institutional distrust reshape political life.
The result is a rigorous and accessible account of authoritarian demand — not merely as elite manipulation, but as a social and political phenomenon rooted in the values and insecurities of ordinary citizens.
Hardcover and paperback, 247 pages
Values, Insecurity, and the Global Dynamics of Authoritarianism
The demand side
Most explanations of democratic backsliding are supply-side. They study elites who dismantle constraints, the institutional engineering that lets them, and the strategic calculations behind it. Those accounts are right as far as they go, and they leave a question unanswered: why do so many citizens go along, and in many places ask for it first?
This book measures that appetite directly. Authoritarian Governance Preference — AGP — is a survey-based construct built from three World Values Survey items on unconstrained leadership, military rule, and democracy itself. Full measurement equivalence across seventy-odd countries is not achievable and the book does not pretend otherwise; it uses alignment optimization to establish approximate invariance and reports how much of it holds. The book then tracks AGP across five survey waves, tests what drives it, and asks whether it forecasts anything.
It does.
The central estimate
A country whose public sits higher on authoritarian governance preference is measurably more likely to begin an autocratization episode in the years that follow, after accounting for how democratic it already was, when the observation was taken, and where in the world it sits.
Chapter 6. Discrete-time hazard model of autocratization onset, re-estimated from the raw data.
| Effect of a one-standard-deviation rise in lagged country-mean AGP | +10.4 percentage points on the probability of onset |
| Relative to the sample onset rate of 17.7 percent | An increase of about 59 percent |
| Odds ratio | 2.19 per standard deviation, and 1.94 with region fixed effects |
| Estimation sample | 215 country-waves, 38 onset events, 81 countries |
| Controls | Electoral democracy level, linear time trend, regional fixed effects |
| Discrimination | AUC 0.672, rising to 0.739 with region fixed effects |
AGP is measured in the survey wave preceding the outcome window, and enters standardized, so the odds ratio is per standard deviation. Requiring a prior-wave observation is what reduces the panel from 325 country-waves to 215; on that larger same-wave sample the odds ratio is a comparable 1.93. The association is predictive rather than causal. Chapter 10 is explicit about the identification limits, and so is the methods summary here. These estimates were re-derived from the raw survey and V-Dem files in September 2026; the replication archive carries the corrected tables.
What the analysis found
Six conclusions carry the book. They describe a picture more nuanced than either optimistic convergence theory or crisis-of-democracy alarm.
Demand is not rising everywhere. AGP trends diverge sharply by country and region, and they are sensitive to whether you estimate them on a balanced panel or the full sample. A global mean is a misleading summary; the action is in the variance. Claims of a universal authoritarian surge on the demand side are not supported.
Education, age and values, in that order. Within a country the strongest individual-level predictors of authoritarian governance preference are education (β = −0.083), age (β = −0.068) and emancipative values (β = −0.030). All three point the same way: the more educated, the older and the more emancipative are less drawn to unconstrained rule.
Insecurity does not appear where the theory says it should. Once country differences are absorbed, economic insecurity is statistically indistinguishable from zero (β = −0.006, p = .34), and no AGP item shows a significant association with it. Institutional trust does predict the composite, but in the opposite direction to the one predicted.
The backlash interaction is not established. The prediction that insecurity erodes the protective effect of emancipative values is directionally present and statistically indistinguishable from zero in the Wave 7 cross-section. It may be real and underpowered here; on this evidence it is not established.
Demand precedes regime change. Higher lagged AGP is associated with a higher hazard of autocratization onset, net of baseline regime type and macro-structural controls. Mass preference carries independent predictive information about what institutions do next.
Waves can ebb, but not on their own. Declines in authoritarian risk are most likely where insecurity falls, trust stabilizes, and emancipative values keep growing. Ebb is not rare: 71 countries in the study period recorded at least one wave-to-wave transition meeting the book’s threshold. It is also neither automatic nor universal.
What it is built on
The four data sources and the role each one plays.
| Source | Used for | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| WVS Wave 7 | Individual-level mechanism tests | Wave 7 microdata, 2017–2022 |
| EVS/WVS Joint file | Cross-national AGP estimates | The integrated joint file |
| WVS Integrated Trend File v4.1 | Longitudinal trends | Five waves, 1995–2022 |
| V-Dem Episodes of Regime Transformation | The outcome being predicted | Autocratization onset, 1995–2022 |
Measurement equivalence is handled by alignment optimization rather than assumed. How the construct was built and tested.
Who it is for
Scholars of comparative politics and political behavior; graduate seminars where methodological transparency is as much the subject as the findings; analysts working on democratic resilience and political risk; and readers who want the evidence behind a debate usually conducted without any.
Every estimate in the book can be reproduced. The analysis code, replication scripts, and output tables are public.
Hardcover and paperback, 247 pages