Multiple experts are warning that President Donald Trump is gradually eroding American democracy through his actions since resuming office in 2025. Now, a new study from the American Journal of Political Science explains how so many Americans are willing to go along with his authoritarianism.
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To learn this, researchers turned to Norway in order to assess how ordinary people reacted when surrounded by individuals with authoritarian ideologies, reported PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan on Sunday. In a paper co-authored by Sirianne Dahlum, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Alexander Wuttke, the scholars conducted a “field experiment [which] randomly assigned soldiers to different rooms during boot camp, so soldiers lived among peers with varying levels of openness to authoritarian rule. We found that many individuals adjusted their privately reported support for authoritarian rule to align more closely with their peers.”
They added, “Further survey-experimental evidence among soldiers and the general Norwegian population confirms that learning about others’ level of support for authoritarian rule changes both perceptions and own support. Our results suggest that support for authoritarian rule can have a social basis and could potentially spread through social contagion in established democracies.”
As a result of their study, the researchers concluded that there are weaknesses in democratic cultures when it comes to combating authoritarian ideas.
“The social basis of regime preferences that we have identified could imply that support for authoritarian rule could quickly spread in a society when citizens realize that these attitudes are more widespread than previously thought,” the authors explained. “It also points to the potential for cascade effects, where initial shifts in attitudes—through exogenous shocks—can spread rapidly through social networks, potentially leading to widespread changes in political norms. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for identifying how authoritarian sentiments might proliferate even in seemingly stable democracies and for developing effective strategies to reinforce and sustain democratic values.”
The researchers learned this first by studying over 1,300 Norwegian military recruits and how their authoritarian views evolved based on whether they were placed in rooms with peers who held or did not hold authoritarian views. They examined how these recruits’ attitudes changed over a period of eight weeks based on those exposures. Then they did the same thing with people outside the Norwegian military.
“To test whether these findings apply outside the military context, the scientists replicated the survey experiment using a representative sample of 1,500 general Norwegian citizens,” Dolan wrote. “The participants received similar prompts about the popularity of strongman leadership in a recent public opinion poll. A control group answered the questions without receiving any prior information about the views of others.”
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Dolan added, “The findings in the general population closely mirrored the results from the military recruits. When ordinary citizens were informed that authoritarian views were widespread, they reported higher levels of personal support for strong leaders. The researchers then conducted a final replication using a massive cross-national sample of over 25,000 respondents from more than 29 different countries, which yielded the same pattern of social influence across diverse cultural contexts.”
As Kotsadam told PsyPost, “The field experiment shows that attitudes can converge among people who actually live together, while the survey experiments indicate that simply learning what other people believe can itself alter stated preferences. More broadly, the findings suggest that the stability of democracy depends not only on what citizens privately believe, but also on what they think their fellow citizens believe.”
If there is any silver lining to the study, it is that these views are not set in stone.
“They can be influenced by the surrounding social climate,” Kotsadam told Doland. As such, “making support for democratic principles visible may help reinforce those principles.”
Writing for Zeteo in April, journalist John Harwood further identified how Trump has eroded democratic norms to turn America into a dictatorship.
“To state the obvious, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler,” Harwood wrote. “MAGA is not Nazism. No despot or movement in history compares to the Third Reich, and the nature and scale of evil it perpetrated. Moreover, Trump’s handiwork appears less formidable today. Most of America recoils from his second-term grotesquerie. If permitted free and fair elections, voters will punish his Republican Party this fall — just as Hungarian voters have now punished Trump’s authoritarian role model Viktor Orbán. But the lessons Rees identifies remain relevant to the crisis confronting 21st-Century America. And that is not merely because Trump and a disturbing number of his young fans have, at times, expressed admiration for Nazi strength and ruthlessness.”
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