One of Us: Autocratic Leadership Undermines Leader Support Less When Leader and Follower Are Politically Aligned

ABSTRACT Autocratic leadership is on the rise globally, even in many long‐standing democracies. While democratically elected leaders who violate democratic norms often lose public support, political allegiances can shape the extent to which citizens withdraw that support. Drawing on social identity theory and the transgression credit theory of leadership, we hypothesize that while group members typically prefer nonautocratic over autocratic political leaders, this preference may weaken when a leader's political orientation or party affiliation aligns with that of group members, and thus the leader is viewed as a member of the ingroup. We test this hypothesis in seven studies (total N = 6385) spanning three countries, a range of leader targets (e.g., UK political leadership, Justin Trudeau, the leaders of the major Canadian political parties, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton), among both liberals and conservatives, at multiple time points over the span of 6 years, and combining both original survey data (Studies 1–4) and secondary analyses of nationally representative panel data from the United States (Studies 5–7). In all studies, participants reported their political affiliation, rated how autocratic they perceive their political leaders (Studies 1–4) or how much they perceive their political leaders disrespect democracy (Studies 5–7), and then evaluated their political leaders. We find robust support for our hypothesis that political affiliation moderates the relationship between perceived autocratic leadership style and leader support. Autocratic leadership style or perceived disrespect for democracy was associated with less favorable leader evaluations, but this negative association was significantly weakened when the leader shared the participants' political affiliation. Thus, although perceiving a leader as autocratic tends to erode leader support, it does so to a significantly lesser extent when the leader represents one's political ingroup.