Legacies of an authoritarian past have enduring effects on voters’ attitudes and behaviors. I argue that authoritarian nostalgia is an important source of group sentiment and related behavior in post-authoritarian democracies. Voters with nostalgic sentiment construct heightened social identity connected to the past, exhibit strong group sentiment based on historical perception, and express attachment towards authoritarian successors.
How do we measure nostalgic sentiment for former dictatorships among voters in national democratic elections? In this paper, we use a social media approach to identify nostalgic rhetoric on Twitter, leveraging the Philippine presidential election in May 2022. We conduct text-as-data analysis and investigate nostalgia for Ferdinand Marcos Sr. among supporters of the namesake son, Marcos Jr.
New democracies have followed different trajectories of democratic consolidation and retained varied vestiges of the former dictatorship. This paper is an effort to find an explanation for such variation in authoritarian legacies across post-authoritarian democracies. To do so, I first discuss two key components of authoritarian legacies: authoritarian inheritance and authoritarian reference.