Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)

Was considering this, that the debates about authoritarian vs democractic philosophy are moot currently. There are times where your population must be treated as a herd. While we often see the "father" metaphor for authoritarian leaders, they're really playing the role of shephard. When not dealing with situations where people may totally screw over others unintentionally, this shepharding becomes unnecessary, & ends up only being a power grab

and building a wall while being a little xenophobic.

“Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare.”

There are so many varied and interacting and nonlinear threats to human welfare that I don’t know if the number of variables to control for (if even identifiable and measurable and appropriately transformed) would allow for meaningful result with only a few hundreds countries as data points.

A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has historically been authoritarian. It’s also worth noting some of those countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.