I think to test it you’d need to do some kind of comprehensive analysis, something like a big spreadsheet of a convincingly unbiased sampling of states (or states-at-points-in-time), evaluated for libertarianism-vs-authoritarianism. But you’d need to have a way to distinguish whether differences between states were caused by inherent per-state effects (or by more mechanistic runs-with-the-state traits, like “having a written constitution” or “being a monarchy”), or by “circumstances”. So you’d need a way to measure plausibly-causitive circumstances and then see how much of the variance they explained.

It’d be a big project and hard to do in a controlled way across a large enough sample, but if you sent enough history grad students out to rate things like “worker organization” in 1925 Germany and “protections for human rights in constitutional law” in 1975 New Zealand on 5-point scales, you might be able to get a data set that could answer this question.

There aren’t really degrees of authoritarian or libertarian in a state, just what circumstances the system finds itself in.

This sounds like that rare thing in political science: a falsifiable assertion. Do you happen to know if anyone has tested it?

Nice try, phone thieves.