Scholars of regimes often assume that democracies and autocracies rely on fundamentally different strategies to legitimate themselves in the eyes of citizens. In Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes, Marlene Mauk aims to show that in fact there is significant common ground in the sources of citizen support across political systems. The book’s basic premise is that the common underpinnings of popular support for political regimes have been underappreciated in the absence of a truly global study based on survey data spanning regions and regime types.

Mauk begins with Dieter Fuchs’s concept of political support, from which she builds the book’s model of regime support. Chapter 3 puts forward a “universal explanatory model” (p. 10) of regime support as shaped by five individual-level factors: societal value orientations, political value orientations, incumbent support, democratic performance evaluations, and systemic performance evaluations. Following Fuchs, the framework predicts that an incumbent government’s performance affects regime support and ultimately values (through the “generalization of experience”) at the same time that values affect support for institutional structures and particular incumbents (“overflow of values”; p. 28). This model is complemented by four system-level determinants—macro-cultural context, macro-political context, actual system performance, and modernization—that shape regime support indirectly through their influence on citizens’ values and performance appraisals (pp. 9–10, 37). These causal mechanisms are argued to “work in the same way in democracies and autocracies” (p. 36)—except that the “causal pathways are distorted in autocracies,” where Mauk expects that autocratic indoctrination and propaganda change systematically the impact of contextual factors on individual values and performance appraisals (p. 37).

One considerable contribution of the book is the data, which are discussed in chapter 4. Mauk has assembled a truly impressive array of surveys covering 102 political systems and more than 220,000 respondents to the World Values Survey, Afrobarometer, AmericasBarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, and Latinobarometer between 2010 and 2014 (p. 18). To explore the role of systemic factors such as level of development, quality of democracy, physical security, and economic performance, the author integrates the survey data with aggregate data from several prominent sources, such as the World Development Indicators, the Political Terror Scale, the Quality of Government Expert Survey, and Freedom House. These data are analyzed together using multilevel structural equation models.

In the empirical analyses presented in chapter 5, Mauk finds that, although citizens in autocracies express somewhat greater support for their political institutions than do citizens in democracies, neither type of political system enjoys overwhelming support, and indeed there is wide variation in the level of popular support within each category. Although some may doubt that surveys credibly measure regime attitudes in autocratic countries, one of the book’s notable findings is that “citizens in autocracies are also willing to voice critical attitudes towards their political regime” (p. 96). This is true even in repressive autocracies. Her pooled analysis, replicated for each survey program and world region, largely confirms that citizens’ values and performance appraisals are the common yardsticks by which citizens judge the regime in both democracies and autocracies.

The study has several strengths. The assembled survey data are impressive, but more importantly, they yield important insights: for example, that economic performance and physical security have much stronger roles in citizen support for autocratic governments than in democratic ones (p. 153). Given the book’s global reach, it also sheds light on the generalizability of some hitherto case-specific findings in the literature; for instance, autocrats deflect blame rather than simply misreport performance (a strategy that the present study implies is successful). Uncertainty about the mechanisms underlying the rich array of associations that the study documents, as well as its more puzzling findings, will be generative for future research. For example, what explains why citizens of countries that are more modernized—that is, wealthier, more industrialized, urban, and educated—seem to be more critical of their regime’s performance? Do they receive more critical information? Do they have higher expectations?

Alongside these strengths, the book also has certain weaknesses. First, its concept of political support does not explicitly incorporate national identity or the sense of belonging to a political community (p. 29), in contrast to the work of David Easton and Pippa Norris. Consequently, recent literature studying the impact of nationalism, patriotism, personality, and positive affect on regime support, such as the work of Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson, Rory Truex, or Henry Hale, does not fit neatly within its framework. Second, regime support is measured as trust in the government, legislature, police, and army. Given differences in the prominence and centrality of these institutions under different political systems (single-party rule, military dictatorship, personalist autocracy heavily reliant on the security apparatus, constitutional democracy, etc.), this measure arguably captures regime support better in some places than in others. A third concern is potential differences in local understandings of key terms. Some concepts do not travel well, a long-standing problem in multicountry surveys designed originally for democracies. What does it mean, for example, to evaluate democratic performance in an autocracy?

Bringing together six comparative survey projects gives the book an unusual sweep but also raises certain challenges. Limited overlap in questions asked by the major survey programs affords only a single indicator for just three of the five individual-level determinants of regime support in the theoretical model. This, as Mauk acknowledges, heightens concerns about alternative explanations, particularly in the main pooled analyses. For example, the study shows that, even though actual macroeconomic performance and security are closely related to citizens’ perceptions, these perceptions do not have a clear effect on confidence in regime institutions—in other words, citizens do not appear to attribute their negative performance appraisals to the regime. The problem could be model misspecification: incumbent support is not included as a potential path by which negative performance appraisals affect regime attitudes, even though most work to date has substantiated such a link and incumbent support is theorized to affect regime support in the present study. Bolstering the global analysis, two regional analyses—one on Africa, the other on Asia (pp. 115–16)—cannot speak to contextual determinants of regime support but do allow for the exploration of additional mechanisms.

Given the book’s research design, it is worth bearing in mind that key findings admit multiple interpretations. The study shows, for example, that more positive perceptions of the quality of democracy enhance support for democratic regimes. The author interprets this relationship causally in the section on policy implications, recommending that democratic leaders focus on deepening democracy (rather than providing generic public goods like economic well-being and public infrastructure) to gain more popular support (p. 170). However, democratic performance evaluations could be endogenous: people who like their political regime may report that it functions better. The direction of the causal arrow, and therefore the effect of any intervention, is not clear-cut. Likewise, the study finds that political liberalization is associated with more critical attitudes toward autocratic regimes, which could mean that controlled political liberalization is likely to hasten autocracy’s demise rather than enhance authoritarian regimes’ legitimacy. Yet it is difficult to be firm in these conclusions given that the tests are all cross-sectional. More critical attitudes toward the regime could in fact be the cause of liberalization. These possibilities make the study a generative starting point for further research and, in that regard, very valuable, but there are limits to what can be confidently inferred from the research design.

In the face of democratic backsliding and authoritarian retrenchment, understanding why citizens have—and lose—confidence in regime institutions is more important than ever. Citizen Support provides a useful counterpoint to the field’s recent emphasis on processes of political attitude formation that are unique to autocracies. Its findings will be of interest to scholars of regimes, public opinion, and political trust as well as advocates of better governance and democracy. Combining extensive survey data and a comprehensive model notable for its synthesis of prominent cultural and institutional explanations, Mauk sheds light on the common logic of regime support in democracies and autocracies.