Abstract | Waves of authoritarian sentiment are often preceded by threats in one form or another. In younger democracies, we often observe countries with food scarcity, wage stagnation, and high unemployment experience nostalgia for authoritarian governance. During the 2008 recession, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and many other third wave democracies experienced the same phenomenon. However, scholars in American politics disagree on the extent to which the economy plays a role in activating authoritarian predispositions. The experiment conducted in this thesis attempts to adjudicate this conflict in the literature by determining whether economic threats are sufficient to activate latent authoritarian attitudes. The findings of this experiment were not statistically significant, but suggestive of a relationship between economic threats and increased intolerance toward outgroups. |