(co-authored with Andreas Kotsadam, Alexander Wuttke and Åshild Johnsen)

Abstract: The increasing popularity of strongman rule in democratic societies underscores the need to understand the origin of authoritarian inclinations among ordinary citizens. We assess the role of social influence on authoritarianism through pre-registered field and survey experiments in the Norwegian Armed Forces and a representative sample of the Norwegian population. The field experiment randomly assigned army recruits to different rooms, so that they lived among peers with varying levels of openness to authoritarian rule. We found that many individuals adjusted their support for authoritarian rule to align more closely with their peers. Also those that were initially highly opposed to authoritarian rule become more open to it if exposed to relatively authoritarian peers. Further survey-experimental evidence among soldiers and the general Norwegian population confirms that learning about others’ level of support for authoritarian rule changes both perceptions about the preferences of others’ and own attitudes. Our results indicate that support for authoritarian rule can have a social basis and could potentially spread through social contagion in established democracies.