Word.ws English Dictionary

performative authoritarianism

performative authoritarianism noun: a display of authoritarian force by a government, particularly when unnecessary, as a means to convince or coerce the media and the population into believing that the government has control in matters of law and order.

Noun

performative authoritarianism (uncountable)

  1. A display of authoritarian force by a government, particularly when unnecessary, as a means to convince or coerce the media and the population into believing that the government has control in matters of law and order.
    • I also have doubts that the distinction between what constitutes “performative authoritarianism” and regular authoritarianism matters to the people who have been reportedly bashed over the head, tear-gassed, and in select cases, hauled off to undisclosed locations.2020 July "Michael Arceneaux" "https://www.essence.com/op-ed/donald-trump-operation-legend/"

Questions about performative authoritarianism

What does performative authoritarianism mean?
Performative authoritarianism means a display of authoritarian force by a government, particularly when unnecessary, as a means to convince or coerce the media and the population into believing that the government has control in matters of law and order.
What part of speech is performative authoritarianism?
Performative authoritarianism is a noun.

Words near performative authoritarianism in the dictionary

  1. performantly
  2. performants
  3. performation
  4. performatism
  5. performative
  6. performative authoritarianism
  7. performative utterance
  8. performative utterances
  9. performatively
  10. performativeness
  11. performatives

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: performative authoritarianism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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