State surveillance has been extensively investigated in various contexts in relation to the use of technology, external threats and people’s attitudes and characteristics. However, the relationship between political attitudes and the public’s acceptance of state surveillance has been underexplored. Our article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to identify the effects of citizens’ political preferences regarding the acceptance of state surveillance in Hungary. We use individual-level data from a survey conducted in October 2022 on a national-level representative sample. We find that populist attitudes have no effect on the acceptance of surveillance, but also that support for a right-wing government, age and gender have strong explanatory power.
Țap et al. (Thu,) studied this question.