Valeria Widler: The Authoritarian Dynamic in Liberal Democracies

In recent years, a global tide of authoritarianism is sweeping liberal democracies, wherein citizens increasingly question democratic institutions, values and notions of tolerance and solidarity towards out-group members. In terms of the social interdependence theory, zero-sum game behavior is on the rise, whereas cooperative behavior is on the decline. This indicates a significant change in the aggregate dynamics of a society.
My research is investigating the complex systemic causes that give rise to authoritarianism, a preference for social conformity at the expense of freedom and diversity, in order to synthesize a complex systems-informed understanding of democratic destabilization and resilience.
In order to do so, I want to employ bottom-up modeling of attitude dynamics in society by way of several agent-based models informed by socio-psychological theories about the cognitive-affective origins of opinions and the interaction dynamics in society. With the integration of social psychology into a complex systems framework, I attempt to create a more realistic basis to investigate the reconfiguration of feedback loops, the effects of social media resulting in co-occurring phenomena such as opinion polarization as well as down-ward causation dynamics.

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