Elias Dinas (European University Institute)

This seminar is part of the NASP-CCA Days 2025 edition workshop

Post-authoritarian norms and the ideological legacy of dictatorships

Abstract: While much research on new democracies examines the number of parties, less attention has been paid to their ideological placement. We explore how past dictatorships shape the ideological landscape of successor democracies, building on two premises: (1) dictatorships typically have a clear ideological orientation, and (2) democracies enjoy a reputational premium over authoritarian rule. These conditions foster the stigmatization of actors and ideas associated with the dictator’s ideological side. This leads to two testable expectations about political supply. First, party systems in new democracies should exhibit ideological asymmetry, with fewer parties aligning with the dictator’s side—left or right. Second, parties that do align with the dictator’s side engage in strategic signaling to obscure this association. Using a pre-registered survey of 1,000 independent coders assessing ~1,500 party names, we find that such parties are systematically misperceived as more moderate than expert benchmarks suggest. This effect appears only in former dictatorships, and only for parties aligned with the dictator’s side.