The Autocracy Bias: Evaluating Democratic Citizens’ Perception of Human Rights Violations in Policy Proposals Abroad

Abstract Do citizens in democracies view foreign policies as more violative of human rights based on the governing regime’s type? We hypothesize that in democratic societies, there is an inherent association of autocracy with human rights violations, leading citizens to believe that policies from authoritarian governments infringe upon human rights more than those from democracies, even when the policies are seemingly identical. We evaluate this autocracy bias by gathering evidence from nine survey experiments across seven democracies. Consistently, we find that citizens of democratic countries are more likely to consider a policy to be a violation of human rights if China adopts it, compared to when a seemingly identical policy is adopted by Spain or Italy. We find that this perception extends to eleven other authoritarian regimes, and a mechanism experiment reveals that regime type is the driving force behind this differential evaluation. This study contributes to the understanding of how citizens in democratic societies perceive respect for human rights in foreign countries.