Public Preferences for Political Authority and Governance in Jordan

This study examines how Jordanian citizens evaluate political authority and alternative systems of governance under different contextual conditions. Building on the literature that conceptualizes Jordanian monarchical rule as a mediating and coalition-managing regime rather than a purely coercive authoritarian system, the study conceptualizes political legitimacy as conditional and functionally grounded. Using an original nationwide online survey experiment in Jordan, the research combines a randomized framing experiment, a conjoint experiment, and a list experiment to analyze how citizens trade off political centralization, parliamentary authority, technocratic governance, tribal-based allocation, judicial independence, political freedom, and foreign policy orientation. By identifying how preferences shift across security-oriented and livelihood-oriented contexts, the study aims to clarify when and why centralized authority, limited political freedoms, or external alignment are perceived as legitimate. The findings contribute to comparative research on Middle Eastern governance by demonstrating that public support for political authority in Jordan is neither ideologically fixed nor uniformly regime-supportive, but instead contingent on perceived governing functions and contextual priorities.