Evaluating Authoritarian Performance: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Attitudes in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT Many authoritarian regimes seek mass support through policy performance – delivering material benefits to citizens. When do citizens respond to these appeals? Standard explanations emphasize national‐level outcomes and individual patronage, along with regimes' messaging “spin.” By contrast, we argue that historical legacies of coalition building have an enduring impact on citizens' attitudes regardless of more recent, objective performance. We test this proposition by examining mass perceptions of the Saudi monarchy's job‐creation efforts, drawing on time‐series polling and an original survey experiment. Saudi citizens from the kingdom's western and southern regions – where narratives of marginalization and exclusion circulate – hold more negative views of regime policy performance compared with individuals from the more‐favored Central regions, regardless of the monarchy's objective jobs performance. Messaging strategies are likewise clearly effective only for Central‐region respondents. Our findings suggest that historical legacies of development substantially affect perceptions of regime performance in the long run.