WVS Webinar on July 15. Autocratic Modernity? Psychological Cracks in a Dystopian Model
Welcome to the World Values Survey Association's webinar series. In these monthly sessions, we invite scholars from various disciplines who utilize WVS survey data, either alone or in combination with other datasets, to share their latest findings and insights. The webinars will explore a wide range of topics measured through the time-series WVS surveys, covering analysis of both substantive issues and methodological perspectives. Learn more about the forthcoming webinars here.
In this webinar, WVSA Vice-President Prof. Dr. Christian Welzel of Leuphana University Lüneburg explores whether autocratic regimes can sustain their grip in the face of socioeconomic modernization. Presenting new research on the psychological effects of development, he shows that while authoritarian systems may suppress emancipatory values, they cannot fully prevent them from emerging. These findings suggest that the internal pressures generated by modernization could ultimately undermine the stability of modernizing autocracies.
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Autocratic Modernity? Psychological Cracks in a Dystopian Model
A growing number of scholars consider China as the quintessential counterfactual to disprove modernization theory’s claim of a tight link between development and democracy. Indeed, several authoritarian regimes around the globe showcase an autocratic version of modernity that challenges the West’s democratic model. In the face of this challenge, it is essential to find indications to tell which of the two competing visions of modernity is more likely to prevail throughout the world’s renewed system rivalry. To shed light on this issue, we present a multilevel moderation study. It estimates to what extent higher degrees of autocracy at the country level are able to block modernization’s emancipatory psychological impulses at the individual level. As it turns out, countries at higher levels of autocracy manage to weaken but are unable to eliminate the emancipatory psychological dynamics that socioeconomic modernization infuses into populations. We conclude that rising emancipative values pose an unresolvable challenge to the coercive nature of modernizing autocracies—a challenge so deeply grounded in mass psychology that it explains autocracies’ temporally steeply growing risk of regime termination compared to equally aged democracies.
Prof. Dr. Christian Welzel is Professor of Research of Political Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg and head of the Center for the Study of Democracy. He is also Vice President of the World Values Survey Association and a Fellow of the German Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina” . His research focuses on democratization, sociocultural evolution, and the emergence of emancipative values. He is the author of Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation, which received the 2014 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.
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