Young adults fall for non-democratic ideology regardless of their education and political leaning: a data report from a Czech physiological study

Abstract

The number of countries, identifying themselves as liberal democracies, have decreased recently after yielding to various forms of electoral authoritarianism due to the citizens' characteristics and political attitudes. The authors address the importance of physiology and physiological reactions within political psychology in two types of electrodiagnosis (EDX) experiments while the authors simultaneously recorded electrodermal activity (EDA), measuring the skin conductance responses (SCR), and the facial muscle activity via facial electromyography (fEMG). In line with the EEG study of Kremláček et al. (2019), the authors did not verify any liaison between political leaning and the physiological data recorded from the Czech participants. Therefore, political leaning may not necessarily represent such a strong variable, as in the West where Amodio et al. (2007) had initially conducted their pioneering experiment. Not only do the results from this physiological experiment confirm the problematic character of political leaning as a variable outside the Western countries, but they also show that education may be less explanatory as a variable in terms of getting enthusiastic about non-democratic ideologies, notwithstanding the level of pupils' self-declared approval of non-democratic ideology.