Predictator - February 2022
Authoritarian leader popularity as a bellwether of instability.
Authoritarian leaders can be unpredictable. Yet their public support can be a leading indicator of their actions. Highly popular leaders may seek to further consolidate their grip on power by weakening institutional checks and balance or tilting the electoral playing field in their direction. Leaders who are losing public support may take diversionary actions — attacking international or internal enemies or launching territorial disputes. Pollitik’s Predictator tracks support for authoritarian and autocratizing leaders. These refer to leaders of countries with consistently low or significantly reduced levels of liberal democracy since 2010, per V-Dem. From there, we select leaders for which the Executive Approval Project (EAD) has collected data.
This allows our initial Predictator to focus on sitting leaders of the Philippines, Hungary, India, Russia, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Turkey and Brazil. The graphic below shows how much liberal democracy has eroded in these countries. We see the most dramatic recent declines in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, India under Narendra Modi, Luis Arce’s Bolivia, and Filipino leader, Rodrigo Duterte. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Carrie Lam’s Hong Kong, and Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela have maintained relatively low levels of liberal democracy for most of the decade.
We estimate leader approval using the dyads-ratio algorithm. This graphic displays monthly approval ratings for these leaders from the time they took office to the most recent data point.
Erdoğan claims both highest (84, November 2007) and lowest (12, January 2010) approval ratings among these authoritarian leaders. Other leaders registering high popularity including Modi (81, May 2017) and Duterte (76, November 2020). Lam (12, January 2020) ties Erdoğan’s low point. By our estimates, the most popular authoritarian leaders are Putin (64), Duterte (58) and Orbán (51). Maduro (28) and Bolsanaro (22) are the least popular.
In addition to levels of support, the overall volatility of their support may shape leaders’ actions. Here, we find the most volatile approval ratings belong to Lam (standard deviation = 14.19) followed by Modi (10.95), and Erdoğan (10.43).
Predictator’s ultimate goal is to shed light on the potential moments of instability in countries where democracy is in short supply. These approval and volatility estimates establish a baseline of comparison for future analysis.
In the coming months, Pollitik’s Predictator will analyze politically relevant aspects of leader support in these countries. It will also add new countries as data permits. Stay tuned and spread the word!