Recovered from the original publisher: Kellogg Insight
For better or worse, this latter style of “strong” leadership has been increasingly popular over the last several years in realms such as politics, sports, and business.
Kellogg’s Maryam Kouchaki, along with Krishnan Nair of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Marlon Mooijman from Rice University, investigated how people respond to this style of strong leadership in the U.S. and Europe across a wide range of races and ethnicities as well as political affiliations.
Through a series of studies based on data from 2016 through 2023, they found that ethnic minorities favor strong political leaders significantly more than do white individuals. This preference applies even across political lines: ethnic minorities who are Republican tend to have the greatest preference for strong political leaders, followed by ethnic-minority Democrats and white Republicans, with white Democrats the most averse.
“In our data, we find that white Democrats are the group that are different from all other groups, both minorities and white Republicans,” Kouchaki says.
Nair notes that these findings provide a helpful lens for understanding recent voting trends among ethnic minorities in Western democracies. It also suggests how these trends may shape the elections of political leaders in the years to come.
“Ethnic minorities are a growing proportion of the U.S. population,” says Nair, who completed a postdoc at Kellogg. “Within the next several decades, they will probably become a majority, which likely has important implications for the kinds of leaders we may elect.”
Preferred leadership style
The researchers used a broad understanding of “strong leader” for their investigation: someone with a dominant and tough personality, and whose leadership style leans into undemocratic or authoritarian tendencies.
In the first of a series of studies, the researchers assessed people’s preferences for leadership style based on information from a nationally representative sample of 4,270 participants in the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey. They determined people’s attitude toward strong leadership by asking, on a 1-to-5 scale, how much participants agreed with the following statement: “Having a strong leader in government is good for the United States even if the leader bends the rules to get things done.”