Explaining the Global Rise of Dominance Leadership
Political pundits, commentators and average citizens continue to have trouble accounting for the rise of populist authoritarian leaders across the globe. The common question batted around continues to be how leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Nicolás Maduro, Recep Erdogan could become the standard-bearers of democracy for countries like the US, Hungary, Philippines, Venenzuela and Turkey. Much of the writing has concentrated on the west, and specifically the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president. The suggestions tendered have ranged from a backlash against the first African American president, the rejection of insider fat cats, or a rebuff of Washington policies. But narratives like these fall short of explaining the rise of authoritarian leaders globally.
Intrigued by this global phenomenon, we set out to study this phenomenon empirically. We invoked findings from evolutionary, social and political psychology to understand when and why such leaders are voted into power.
Drawing on work in ethological and behavioral ecology, Joseph Henrich and colleagues have articulated and provided empirical support for two distinct and viable routes of attaining social rank within society: dominance and prestige. A dominance strategy employs fear via intimidation and coercion, while a prestige strategy relies on sharing skills and knowledge with others in exchange of their respect and deference. In our recent paper, we show that when citizens experience economic uncertainty and its accompanying loss of personal control, they look to dominant leaders — those perceived as more agentic, forceful and decisive — over their prestige counterparts, to restore their feelings of control. We employed objective macroeconomic indicators of economic prosperity across 25,000+ zip codes in the US, to predict voter’s preference for dominant versus prestige leaders. In line with our belief, we find economic uncertainty to significantly predict voter’s preference for dominant forceful leaders, in both local and national elections.
Furthermore, to demonstrate the ubiquity of this basic psychological phenomenon, we went beyond the US, and drew on 20 years of world economic data, maintained by the World Bank, coupled with historic data on social and political beliefs of citizens of these countries, to replicate these findings among citizens of 69 countries – a replication that represents 90% of the world’s population. Drawing on evolutionary theory of leadership emergence, we provide the first empirically based situational and psychological account for both when and why dominant leaders are preferred over other respected and admired candidates, globally.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/explaining-the-global-rise-of-ldquo-dominance-rdquo-leadership/
