Why Some Voters Are More Open to Dominating Leaders

Based on research by Marlon Mooijman (Rice Business), Krishnan Nair (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern)

Key takeaways:

• Support for dominant, rule-bending leaders is shaped by more than a left-right political ideology.
• Across multiple datasets, white Democrats were the least supportive of strong-arm leaders, while minority Democrats were more open to them.
• “Generalized trust” helps explain the gap. When trust rises, support for dominant leadership falls.

When researchers looked at who supports dominant, rule-bending leaders, they expected political ideology to tell most of the story. But it didn’t.

Black, Hispanic and Asian voters expressed significantly more openness to strongman leadership styles than white voters — and minority Democrats often looked more like right-wing white voters on this question than like their fellow Democrats. The reason, new research suggests, has less to do with party affiliation than with something more fundamental: how much people trust those around them.

That finding comes from new research co-authored by Marlon Mooijman of Rice Business, working with colleagues from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The team set out to understand what actually drives the appeal of “strong-arm” leaders — politicians who promise to cut through disorder by centralizing power, sidelining opposition and getting things done by force of will.

For years, researchers have treated this preference as mainly a feature of right-wing politics. Mooijman’s work suggests the story is more complicated. Ideology matters, but it is not the only factor. Race, ethnicity and trust in other people also shape whether voters prefer a dominant leader willing to bend the rules.

Why do some voters prefer authoritarian leaders?

To investigate, the researchers analyzed data from the American National Election Studies, the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey, drawing on responses from tens of thousands of participants. 

Some of the results were predictable. For example, Republicans were generally more supportive of this kind of leadership than Democrats.

But ideology did not explain everything.

“For those who have low levels of trust in other members of society, a strong leader’s vision for the future could seem a more expedient way to deal with these problems than the compromises inherent to democratic deal making.”

White voters, the researchers found, were the most averse to dominant, rule-bending leaders, and white Democrats were the least supportive group of all. Black, Hispanic and Asian voters, by contrast, expressed significantly more openness to strong leadership styles than white voters. In fact, the preferences of minority Democrats were often closer to those of right-wing white voters than to those of left-wing white voters.

The importance of generalized trust 

The surveys revealed a striking demographic pattern, but they did not explain why it existed.

The researchers suspected that one answer might lie in what social scientists call “generalized trust”: the belief that most people in society, including strangers, can generally be trusted.

That mattered because generalized trust was not distributed evenly across groups. Left-leaning white respondents tended to report the highest levels of trust, and they were also the least likely to prefer dominant leaders. Minority respondents, meanwhile, often reported lower levels of generalized trust.

The researchers argue that this difference may reflect unequal social experience. People who face discrimination, institutional barriers or unequal access to public goods may have fewer reasons to believe society will work fairly on their behalf. In that context, a forceful leader can seem appealing not because democratic norms no longer matter, but because democratic compromise may feel too slow or unreliable to solve urgent problems.

“Every society has its problems,” says Mooijman. “Strong leaders often position themselves as the solution to persistent issues like poverty or crime. For those who have low levels of trust in other members of society, a strong leader’s vision for the future could seem a more expedient way to deal with these problems than the compromises inherent to democratic deal making.”

Proving the impact of trust

To see whether trust was doing more than merely correlating with these preferences, the researchers ran a series of experiments.

In one, participants were asked to imagine living in a fictional city. Some participants read a high-trust description of the city’s residents, who were portrayed as compassionate, hardworking and reliable. Others did not receive that cue. When participants were placed in a higher-trust setting, the gap in leadership preferences disappeared.

In another experiment, participants played a social-dilemma game involving a shared pool of $10. Some participants saw other group members behave cooperatively and refrain from taking money for themselves. Others did not. Those who saw more cooperation were less likely to want a forceful, dominant leader to manage the group. Those who did not see cooperation were more likely to prefer that kind of a leader.

Ultimately, these results confirm what the survey data suggested: a lack of societal trust is an active psychological trigger that drives the appeal of strong-arm leaders.

A global trend with corporate implications

These findings matter beyond the ballot box. In workplaces, too, employees bring different expectations to leadership, authority and decision-making. People who have less reason to trust institutions or peers may be more receptive to top-down leaders that promise order and decisive action.

The broader lesson is straightforward: when trust erodes, dominant leaders can look more attractive. 

“If democratic societies and organizations want people to place their faith in more participatory forms of leadership, they cannot rely on process alone,” Mooijman says. “They also have to create conditions in which trust feels warranted.”

Written by Ty Burke

Mooijman, et al (2025). “The Ethnic and Political Divide in the Preference for Strong Leaders,” Psychological Science.