For better or worse, this latest style of “strong” leadership has been increasingly popular in recent years in bullets such as politics, sports and businesses.
Kellogg’s Maryam Kouchakitogether with Krishnan nair of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Marlon Mooijman From Rice University, he explored how people respond to this style of strong leadership in the US and Europe to a wide range of tribes and ethnicities as well as political relations.
Through a series of studies based on data from 2016 to 2023, they found that ethnic minorities favor powerful political leaders significantly more than white people. This preference applies even to political lines: ethnic minorities that are Republicans tend to have the greatest preference for powerful political leaders, followed by ethnic democrats and white Republicans, with white democrats being more opposed.
“In our data, we find that white Democrats are the group that is different from all other groups, both minorities and white Republicans,” says Kouchaki.
Nair notes that these findings provide a useful lens for understanding recent trends of voting among ethnic minorities in Western democracies. He also proposes how these trends can form the elections of political leaders in the coming years.
“Ethnic minorities are a growing percentage of the US population,” says Nair, who completed a postdoc in Kellogg. “In the coming decades, there will probably be a majority, which probably has a significant impact on the types of leaders we can choose.”
Preferred style of leadership
The researchers used a broad understanding of the “powerful leader” for their research: someone with a dominant and harsh personality and whose leadership style leans in anti -democratic or authoritarian tendencies.
In the first of a series of studies, the researchers evaluated people’s preferences for leadership style based on information from a national representative sample of 4,270 participants in the 2016 National Election Studies (ANES) survey. They repelled people’s attitude towards strong leadership by demanding, on a scale of 1 to 5, how much the participants agreed with the following statement: “The existence of a strong leader in the government is good for the United States, even if the leader bends the rules to do things.”
As opposed to before researchAs well as in a reproduction study using the 2020 ANES research, the researchers found that white Republicans favor powerful leaders significantly more than white democrats.
But the team also found that, overall, blacks, Latinos and Asians favor powerful leaders even more than white. In fact, left-wing minorities agree that the possession of a powerful political leader is good for the country as well as the right-wing white ones-the right minorities favor powerful leaders even more than the two teams.
The researchers have faced the same findings in two additional studies they conducted to determine leadership preferences: one based on the responses of American world-class research from 2017-2022 and another based on the responses of people from 13 different European countries.
The role of trust
There is, says Nair, something amazing in these results. Polls usually show that ethnic minorities tend to be aligned with the political left. “And yet, the powerful leaders, even those linked to the right, still have this appeal among ethnic minorities,” says Nair. “So what’s going on?”
The answer seems to be linked to the level of trust of people.
In the same research on powerful leaders, the researchers also asked the participants a series of questions to measure their trust in other people. They found that, on average, ethnic minorities had much less confidence in others than white respondents and that this lower level of trust was associated with their preference for powerful leaders.
“We believe that there are two factors that contribute to these low levels of trust,” says Nair. “First, many minorities are recent arrivals from countries where general trust is simply lower. Secondly, minority groups are more likely to face a relevant disadvantage, which tends to reduce people’s confidence levels in others.”
The researchers conducted two experiments to further explore this relationship between trust and leadership preferences.
In the first experiment, people were invited to imagine that they live in a fantastic land called Tanjoda. Half of the participants said that the people of Tanjoda are reliable and compassionate. The other half said nothing about people. Participants who told them anything about the people of Tanjoda – and therefore were less likely to trust them – were also more likely to prefer powerful leaders.
The second experiment included a game in which there was a common $ 10 team. Participants were able to get $ 2 for themselves every round of the game. Anyone who remained at the end of the game would triple and distribute equally. Half of the participants listened to these instructions, watched a round unfolded in which none of the team members took money for themselves and then took a survey related to powerful leaders. The other half heard these instructions and then took the research without watching a round unfolded. In a parallel to the first experiment, people who did not see a cooperative round unfolded were more likely to prefer powerful leaders.
“We had experimentally changing perceptions of credibility and when people thought others were more reliable, powerful leaders were less favorable,” Nair says. “This does not mean that there are no other things that contribute to preferences for powerful leaders, but generalized confidence is an important trigger.”
A modern trend
Nair says that their findings have a significant impact on both researchers and society. For the former, it is important to note that investigations into political views in the US have been disproportionately based on white Democrats, whose views on powerful leaders are unique compared to white Republicans and ethnic minorities.
‘In our study, we show [white Democrats] To be exaggerated in this particular dimension, “says Nair.” But it can be excessive in other dimensions and this would be important to know when the samples we draw as researchers are often obliquely white and liberal. “
The results also speak in a modern political trend in democracies around the world: the rise of harsh or powerful leaders who can have authoritarian properties, many of which are promoted by the support of ethnic minorities. In the US, for example, Donald Trump’s Share of voting between minorities from 2020 to 2024 It almost doubled among black voters and increased from 36 to 48 % among Latino voters.
Whether this trend continues to grow remains unclear, but it is likely to play an important role in the future elections.
“Most importantly, our research shows that these preferences extend beyond politics and are also apparent in organizations,” says Kouchaki. “Recognizing and understanding these differences is essential for effective leadership.”
