Overestimation of the level of democracy is prevalent among citizens in non-democracies. Despite such prevalence, no research to date has systematically documented this phenomenon and examined its determinants. Yet given the renewed interest in the role of legitimacy in authoritarian survival, studying whether and why this phenomenon arises is important to our understanding of authoritarian resilience.
I argue that, even in the absence of democratic institutions in non-democracies, autocrats exercise media control in order to boost their democratic legitimacy. This façade of democracy, in turn, benefits their survival.
Combining media freedom data with individual survey response data that include over 30,000 observations from 22 non-democracies, I find that:
overestimation of the level of democracy is greater in countries with stronger media control. But highly educated citizens overestimate less.
[cf 2018. Notably, overestimation is highest for China, and the USA among the most underestimated.]
These findings shed light on media control as a strategy for authoritarian survival, and have important implications for modernization theory.
[Keywords: non-democratic regimes, comparative public opinion, media control, democratic legitimacy, authoritarian resilience]