It is well established that exposure to threats causes citizens to prioritize security considerations and accept restrictions on civil liberties. Yet most studies on which these findings are based come from longstanding democracies and do not distinguish among types of threat. This article argues that the effects of internal and external threats are conditional on regime type. It tests the argument via an experiment embedded in an original survey of Georgia and Kazakhstan, countries that vary in regime type but face similar levels of threat. In authoritarian Kazakhstan, there is no difference in attitudes by threat type, whereas external threats produce greater support for security than internal ones in more pluralistic Georgia. Contrary to previous research, security preferences are not mediated by the triggering of anxiety. The findings contribute to literatures on the link between threats and authoritarian preferences, the rally-round-the-flag effect, and the ways that political institutions mediate psychological processes.

众所周知，暴露于威胁会导致公民优先考虑安全因素并接受对公民自由的限制。然而，这些发现所依据的大多数研究都来自长期存在的民主国家，并没有区分威胁的类型。本文认为，内部和外部威胁的影响取决于政权类型。它通过嵌入在格鲁吉亚和哈萨克斯坦的原始调查中的实验来验证这一论点，这两个国家的政权类型不同，但面临的威胁程度相似。在威权主义的哈萨克斯坦，不同威胁类型的态度没有区别，而在更加多元化的格鲁吉亚，外部威胁比内部威胁对安全产生更大的支持。与之前的研究相反，安全偏好不是由焦虑的触发介导的。