Autocratization Spillover: When Electing an Authoritarian Erodes Election Trust across Borders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rich literature on election trust predominantly uses domestic determinants as explanatory factors. But given the international nature of the autocratization wave, can an autocratization event across borders erode election trust? This article argues that an authoritarian's electoral success in a neighboring country can shatter democratic norms and demonstrate the viability of authoritarians. This autocratization event abroad can thus reduce citizens' principled support for democracy and its political system. Consequently, citizens across borders are less likely to see democratic elections as the "only game in town" and they have less trust in elections. To test this idea, I study the spillover effects of the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, in which an authoritarian candidate won decisively. Using the AmericasBarometer in Colombia that was launched throughout this election, I find that the election trust of Colombian citizens erodes after Jair Bolsonaro's electoral success. To probe into the mechanism, I uncover that his electoral victory leads Colombian citizens to be less supportive of the domestic political system and reduces their principled support for democracy. The causal mediation analysis demonstrates that these two variables mediate the effect of the authoritarian's electoral success on election trust. These findings on autocratization spillover effects illustrate the importance of external autocratization events in the study of election trust.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".