Patriotic Stockholm Syndrome in the era of electoral authoritarianism

Abstract

How do electoral authoritarian regimes sustain popular support despite failing to deliver democratic freedom or economic stability? This paper argues that traditional strategies of coercion, indoctrination, and clientelism are insufficient for maintaining the necessary façade of democratic legitimacy. Instead, I propose a new theoretical framework: “Patriotic Stockholm Syndrome” (PSS). Building on the Need for Closure theory as its core mechanism, and supplemented by Terror Management Theory and trauma bonding as auxiliary processes, I demonstrate how regimes strategically manufacture legal, economic, and geopolitical anxiety to create a state of chronic uncertainty. In this environment, the regime introduces “empowerment-based patriotism” as a psychological solution. Citizens, driven by their own need to resolve intolerable ambiguity, latch onto the regime’s binary narrative and become cognitively resistant to alternative worldviews—actively constructing and defending their own confinement. Unlike manipulation, indoctrination, or securitization, PSS locates the engine of compliance in the citizen’s own cognition rather than in top-down imposition or discursive framing alone. This bottom-up cognitive entrapment transforms political submission into a perceived sense of agency, while progressively outsourcing the function of coercion to the citizenry itself. The paper specifies observable behavioral signatures of PSS, articulates its scope conditions, and proposes a multi-method empirical agenda for testing the framework. PSS resolves the central paradox of electoral authoritarianism: it generates support that appears voluntary on the surface but is structurally involuntary at a deeper psychological level, effectively bonding citizens to the very architects of their distress.

1 Introduction

In 1973, following the Norrmalmstorg bank robbery in Stockholm, hostages unexpectedly developed positive emotional bonds with their captors, a phenomenon subsequently termed “Stockholm Syndrome.” This paradoxical psychological attachment reveals how individuals under existential threat often gravitate toward perceived protectors, even when those protectors are the very source of their peril (Ochberg, 1978; Auerbach et al., 1994). While the clinical status of Stockholm Syndrome itself has been contested (Namnyak et al., 2008; Adorjan et al., 2012), its underlying psychological mechanisms—trauma bonding, identification with the aggressor (Freud, 1936/1966), and the desperate search for cognitive closure—are independently established in the literature and offer a powerful heuristic for understanding the durability of contemporary electoral authoritarian regimes.

This paper investigates how electoral authoritarian regimes sustain popular support despite failing to deliver democratic freedom or economic stability. I argue that the three traditional variants of patriotization—coercive, indoctrinated, and clientelist—each fail to satisfy the paradoxical dual requirement these regimes face: support must appear voluntary on the surface to preserve the democratic façade, while functioning as a psychologically compelling imperative that secures durable compliance. Coercion sacrifices voluntariness; indoctrination sacrifices ideological openness; clientelism sacrifices durability. What is required is a mechanism that produces compulsion while preserving subjective agency.

I argue that electoral authoritarian regimes increasingly turn to a distinct strategy that meets this requirement: empowerment-based patriotism. Rather than imposing loyalty through top-down ideological conditioning, the regime instrumentalizes anxiety. Through calculated legal ambiguity, manufactured economic precarity, and the amplification of geopolitical threat, it cultivates an environment of chronic uncertainty in which patriotism is offered not as a duty but as a psychological solution—a coherent worldview that empowers the citizen to regain a sense of agency by defending the nation against enemies the state has designated. Citizens, driven by their own need to resolve intolerable ambiguity, latch onto the regime’s narrative as a psychological necessity rather than a passively received message.

I term the resulting psychological condition “Patriotic Stockholm Syndrome” (PSS). The label is retained for its rhetorical clarity, but the analytical claims rest on the validity of three independently established psychological mechanisms—Need for Closure, Terror Management Theory, and trauma bonding—rather than on the contested clinical status of Stockholm Syndrome itself (see Section 3). For a significant segment of the citizenry,1 support is neither purely transactional nor entirely forced; it is a psychological coping mechanism generated from the bottom up. As PSS consolidates, the function of coercion is progressively outsourced to citizens whose psychological equilibrium depends on the regime’s worldview remaining unchallenged.

This paper makes four contributions. First, it specifies how PSS differs analytically from adjacent concepts—manipulation, indoctrination, and securitization (Buzan et al., 1998)—by locating the causal engine in citizens’ own cognition rather than in top-down imposition or discursive framing alone. Second, it operationalizes PSS through a set of observable behavioral signatures that distinguish it from competing explanations of regime support. Third, it articulates explicit scope conditions specifying the individual-, regime-, and temporal-level boundaries within which PSS operates. Fourth, it outlines a multi-method empirical agenda for testing the framework, addressing the gap between theoretical elaboration and systematic evaluation. Through this framework, the paper demonstrates how engineered patriotism operates as a deeply embedded psychological compulsion, allowing electoral authoritarian regimes to project an illusion of democratic legitimacy while consolidating power without resorting to overt, stability-threatening repression.

2 Electoral authoritarianism

Schedler (2006) identifies electoral authoritarianism as a distinct regime type characterized by the coexistence of formal democratic institutions, such as multiparty elections, alongside systematic authoritarian manipulation aimed at limiting genuine political competition. Unlike fully democratic systems, electoral authoritarian regimes retain electoral processes primarily to maintain a façade of legitimacy rather than to facilitate authentic democratic contestation. Simultaneously, these regimes differ significantly from closed authoritarian systems by allowing some degree of political opposition and institutional pluralism, even though such opposition remains strategically weakened, systematically undermined, and heavily constrained (Howard and Roessler, 2006; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Schedler, 2006).2 To sustain their dominance, electoral authoritarian leaders carefully manipulate democratic institutions—including legislatures, judiciaries, electoral commissions, and media—ensuring the regime’s continued power while preserving the illusion of democratic legitimacy. Repression in these contexts is typically selective and indirect, employing methods such as legal ambiguity, targeted surveillance, and subtle intimidation rather than overt violence, as explicit repression would compromise the regime’s democratic appearance, trigger domestic resentment, and invite international criticism (Carey, 2006; Francisco, 2005; Levitsky and Way, 2010).

Given the imperative to maintain a democratic façade, I argue that patriotism serves as one of the most effective tools for electoral authoritarian regimes to mobilize support and sustain citizen compliance. Bar-Tal (1993) defines patriotism as a positive affective attachment toward one’s group and the country in which one resides, expressed through “beliefs connoting contents of love, loyalty, pride or care” and grounded in “the desire to belong to a group which is positively evaluated” (p. 48). Patriotism thus provides these regimes with ideological and emotional resources that encourage citizens to voluntarily support the incumbent leadership, thereby reducing the necessity of overt coercion or explicit electoral fraud, both of which could damage the regime’s credibility domestically and internationally. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s regime consistently frames electoral participation as a patriotic duty, emphasizing narratives of national pride, strength, and resilience against foreign interference. Similarly, in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, elections have repeatedly been portrayed as existential battles against internal and external enemies, leveraging nationalist rhetoric to galvanize voter support and justify authoritarian practices (Yilmaz, 2023; Tas, 2025).3

Yet patriotism in these regimes must satisfy a paradoxical dual requirement: it must appear voluntary on the surface to preserve the democratic façade, while simultaneously functioning as a psychologically compelling imperative that secures durable compliance. The next section examines why the three conventional methods of patriotization—coercive, indoctrinated, and clientelist—each fail to satisfy both requirements simultaneously, motivating the search for an alternative model.

3 Three kinds of patriotization

In this section, I evaluate three traditional methods by which authoritarian governments cultivate patriotism—coercive, indoctrinated, and clientelist—and argue that electoral authoritarian regimes encounter inherent constraints in applying each. While these traditional forms rely on fear, passive absorption, or material transaction, the strategy proposed in this paper relies on psychological agency.

Coercive patriotization enforces patriotic behavior through compulsory rituals and the criminalization of perceived disloyalty. Examples range from mandatory participation in patriotic parades and flag-raising ceremonies in North Korea (Son et al., 2022; Gang, 2021) to Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws, under which defaming the monarchy carries up to 15 years’ imprisonment and has been used to prosecute citizens for actions as minor as sending text messages (Merieau, 2021), to Russian regional fines for failing to stand during the national anthem. While effective in signaling dominance, this strategy is costly for electoral authoritarian regimes. It exposes authoritarian practices directly, eroding citizens’ belief in voluntary participation and undermining claims to democratic legitimacy. It also draws international scrutiny that can invite sanctions or diplomatic isolation while exacerbating domestic resentment among urban, educated, and politically conscious groups.

Indoctrinated patriotization is historically prevalent in totalitarian states such as Maoist China and the Soviet Union. It involves systematic ideological conditioning through state-controlled education, media, and cultural institutions (Billig, 1995; Chang and Tang, 2023; Gellner, 1983; Kennedy, 2009). Mao Zedong’s China utilized state-controlled media censorship and compulsory political education sessions, such as the study of the “Little Red Book,” to inculcate ideological devotion (Weatherley, 2006). In the Soviet Union, youth organizations like the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol systematically educated young citizens to internalize patriotic loyalty and communist ideals through mandatory ideological training and collective rituals (Fainsod, 1951). The critical distinction between indoctrination and the empowerment-based model proposed later lies in the role assigned to the citizen: indoctrination treats the citizen as a passive vessel to be filled with state ideology, whereas the model developed in this paper treats the citizen as an active co-producer of the regime’s narrative. Electoral authoritarian regimes, however, must maintain at least an appearance of democratic pluralism and ideological openness; overt ideological indoctrination signals authoritarian intent and contradicts the regime’s strategic ambiguity. Furthermore, the proliferation of globalized digital communication and alternative media increasingly undermines state efforts to monopolize ideological narratives. In Russia, the Kremlin allocated nearly 40 billion rubles to “wartime patriotic initiatives” following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, mandating weekly flag-raising ceremonies and patriotic study sessions in schools. Despite the absence of overtly radical objections, students, schools, and teachers have engaged in soft resistance against this wartime indoctrination (Alava, 2025). Similar patriotic educational initiatives under Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary have faced significant pushback, demonstrating how heavy-handed indoctrination breeds domestic resistance and undermines legitimacy under conditions of globalized information flow.

Clientelist patriotization involves providing patronage in exchange for political support. In Mexico under the PRI’s seven-decade rule, Magaloni (2006) documents how the regime sustained electoral dominance through an elaborate machine of selective public goods provision and conditional access to state resources, channeled through party-aligned networks that rewarded loyalty and punished defection. Yet clientelist patriotization faces significant limitations in electoral authoritarian regimes due to its transactional nature and reliance on sustained economic resources. As Weiss (2016) highlights, transactional loyalty is shallow and prone to defection when opposition parties offer better opportunities or when economic downturns reduce the regime’s distributive capacity. The PRI’s eventual electoral defeat in 2000 illustrates this fragility: as economic conditions shifted and opposition parties developed credible distributive alternatives, the clientelist edifice that had sustained the regime since the 1930s eroded within a single decade. In Suharto’s Indonesia, the regime similarly relied heavily on patronage, welfare provision, and economic prosperity to sustain itself; political actors, however, viewed this patronage as contingent rather than as a long-term commitment to the regime (Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2016). When the Asian Financial Crisis struck in 1997, the government’s incapacity to dispense material benefits precipitated Suharto’s fall in 1998 (Mietzner, 2018).

The patriotization required by electoral authoritarian regimes is therefore fundamentally paradoxical. On one hand, these regimes must maintain a democratic façade, meaning patriotization must appear voluntary and spontaneous: citizens should feel as though they freely choose to support the government, motivated by genuine affection rather than coercion or overt manipulation. On the other hand, to ensure long-term stability, patriotization must be involuntary at a deeper psychological level. Patriotism cannot remain a contingent economic choice; it must be experienced as an emotional imperative compelling unwavering loyalty. None of the three traditional strategies satisfies both requirements simultaneously: coercion sacrifices voluntariness, indoctrination sacrifices ideological openness, and clientelism sacrifices durability. What is required is a mechanism that produces psychological compulsion while preserving subjective agency—a mechanism in which citizens themselves generate the bond. Drawing on the analogy of trauma bonding under captivity, I argue that a form of patriotism analogous to the bond developed toward captors offers precisely this combination, and the next section develops the psychological foundations on which this analogy rests.

4 The psychological foundations: anxiety, closure, and trauma bonding

Before developing the analogy between hostage captivity and authoritarian governance, it is necessary to address a preliminary concern. The clinical status of Stockholm Syndrome is contested: it is not recognized as a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5 or ICD-11, the empirical evidence base is thin, and several scholars have argued that it functions more as a media construct than a validated psychological condition (Namnyak et al., 2008; Adorjan et al., 2012; Cantor and Price, 2007). Feminist critics have further argued that what is labeled as “syndrome” often describes rational survival behavior under coercion rather than pathology. I take these critiques seriously. The framework developed in this paper does not depend on Stockholm Syndrome’s status as a discrete clinical entity. Rather, it draws on three independently validated psychological mechanisms—the Need for Closure (Kruglanski and Webster, 1996), Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al., 1986, 1997), and trauma bonding (Dutton and Painter, 1993), itself rooted in Freud’s (1936/1966) earlier concept of “identification with the aggressor”—that together account for the dynamics popularly associated with Stockholm Syndrome. The label is retained for its rhetorical clarity and recognizability, but the analytical claims rest on the validity of these component mechanisms, each of which is independently established in the empirical literature.

These three mechanisms do not occupy equal analytical weight. The Need for Closure (NFC) is the core engine of the framework: it specifies the bottom-up cognitive process through which manufactured anxiety is converted into active narrative attachment. Terror Management Theory plays a supporting role, explaining why the resulting closure-providing worldview takes the specific form of nation-as-meaning-system rather than some alternative form of cognitive resolution. Trauma bonding is analogical: it illuminates why the citizen-regime relationship, once established, becomes emotionally durable and resistant to disconfirmation, paralleling the bonds observed in abusive interpersonal relationships. The remainder of this section develops each mechanism in turn, beginning with the cognitive engine.

4.1 The need for closure as the core mechanism

Just as captivity generates the anxiety and unpredictability that drive hostages toward cognitive realignment with their captors, the micro-political dynamics of authoritarian governance reproduce, at societal scale, the conditions that political psychology has long identified as triggering compulsive worldview adoption (Auerbach et al., 1994; Greenberg et al., 1986, 1997). The mechanism that converts these conditions into durable loyalty is the Need for Closure.

In states of profound ambiguity, the Need for Closure theory suggests that individuals possess a fundamental motivation to reduce uncertainty by seeking clear, definitive answers, interpretations, or narratives that can impose structure upon chaotic experience (Kruglanski and Webster, 1996). Crucially, Kruglanski and Webster identify two specific cognitive processes activated under high NFC: seizing and freezing. Seizing refers to the tendency of individuals under acute uncertainty to latch onto the first available source of cognitive closure—the earliest coherent narrative that offers relief from ambiguity—without subjecting it to critical scrutiny. Freezing refers to the subsequent cognitive rigidity: once an individual has seized upon a particular interpretation of reality, they become resistant to alternative explanations, contradictory evidence, or competing worldviews. The mind, having found relief from intolerable uncertainty, actively guards against any information that might reopen the painful state of ambiguity. This distinction is central to the framework: seizing and freezing together describe a cognitive mechanism in which the individual does not merely adopt a worldview passively but actively constructs and defends it as a psychological necessity. The process is bottom-up, driven by the individual’s own need to resolve unbearable uncertainty, rather than a product of top-down imposition. It is this property that distinguishes PSS from manipulation and indoctrination, a distinction developed more fully in Section 7.

4.2 Terror management theory: why the worldview takes a patriotic form

The closure that high-NFC individuals seek is not formally empty; it takes a specific cultural form. According to Terror Management Theory (TMT), individuals confronting existential threat manage the resulting terror through the construction of a “cultural worldview”—a coherent system of meaning that provides explanations for existence, experience, and the environment (Greenberg et al., 1986, 1997). As Greenberg et al. (1997) articulate, the cultural anxiety buffer comprises two components: “(a) faith in a meaningful conception of reality (the cultural worldview); and (b) belief that one is meeting the standards of value prescribed by that worldview (self-esteem)” (pp. 70–71). When sustained anxiety meets the need for closure, individuals seek not merely any narrative, but one that offers both metaphysical coherence and a role for the self within it.

A patriotic worldview, in the sense developed by Bar-Tal (1993), supplies precisely this combination. Patriotism furnishes a ready-made cosmology of in-group belonging, external threat, and collective destiny that resolves ambiguity into a clear interpretive structure, while simultaneously providing a basis for self-esteem through the affective attachment, loyalty, and pride that Bar-Tal identifies as its constitutive elements. The two components of the cultural anxiety buffer therefore map directly onto the two components of patriotism: faith in a meaningful conception of reality is supplied by the image of the nation as an enduring community with a coherent history and purpose, and the standards of value prescribed by that worldview are met through the citizen’s standing as a loyal member who loves, defends, and takes pride in the collective. This is why the closure that electoral authoritarian regimes offer takes patriotic rather than, say, religious or class-based form: patriotism is uniquely well-suited to satisfying both components of the anxiety buffer simultaneously, and it is uniquely available to regimes that command the symbolic infrastructure of the state.

In the specific context of Stockholm Syndrome, captives develop a worldview shaped directly by interaction with their captors: the captors’ ongoing abuse, punctuated by unpredictable acts of kindness, creates a paradoxical environment that captives resolve by recontextualizing their captors as figures of genuine care, protection, or goodwill beneath their abusive exterior. The same logic operates at societal scale in electoral authoritarian regimes, where the manufactured anxieties analyzed in Section 4 are reframed by the patriotic worldview developed in Section 5 as the protective vigilance of a regime defending the nation against threats that the regime itself has constructed.

4.3 Trauma bonding: the durability of the attachment

Once the worldview is established, self-esteem becomes activated. In the captivity context, after constructing a narrative of the captor as secretly benevolent or vulnerable, captives must identify a psychologically acceptable role for themselves within that framework. The phenomenon of trauma bonding—rooted in Anna Freud’s (1936/1966) concept of “identification with the aggressor”—explains how this attachment becomes durable. Trauma bonding refers to the powerful emotional attachment formed through cycles of abuse and intermittent reinforcement, characterized by alternating periods of harsh treatment and occasional kindness. As Dutton and Painter (1993) argue, “the situation of alternating aversive and pleasant conditions is an experimental paradigm within learning theory known as intermittent reinforcement/punishment, which is highly effective in producing persistent patterns of behavior that are difficult to extinguish or terminate, and which develops the strongest experimentally produced emotional bonds” (p. 107). In the captivity scenario, trauma bonding enables captives to position themselves as compassionate caretakers or potential saviors of their captors, deriving self-esteem from fulfilling roles that validate their moral worth within the constructed worldview. Reinforced by learned helplessness (Reid, 2024; Walker, 2017), this dependence becomes self-sustaining: even when escape opportunities arise, captives may not take them, because the distorted worldview, emotional bond, and sense of helplessness now provide a paradoxical but psychologically effective sense of comfort and self-worth.

Drawing on these three mechanisms, I argue that electoral authoritarian regimes strategically replicate the conditions of captivity at societal scale. They deliberately generate chronic uncertainty (triggering NFC), they monopolize the supply of meaning-providing narratives (offering a patriotic worldview consistent with TMT), and they alternate between threat and reassurance in ways that produce trauma-like bonds at the population level. The next three sections develop each component in turn: Section 4 examines how regimes manufacture anxiety; Section 5 analyzes the narrative infrastructure through which they construct the closure-providing worldview; and Section 6 explains how empowerment-based patriotism enables citizens to restore self-esteem and agency within that worldview.

5 Manufacturing anxiety: the engine of cognitive closure

Having established that the Need for Closure operates as the core psychological engine of PSS, the question becomes how electoral authoritarian regimes generate the conditions under which NFC is chronically activated. This section argues that anxiety is not an incidental byproduct of authoritarian rule but a deliberately engineered resource. Regimes manufacture anxiety across three domains—legal, economic, and geopolitical—each of which produces a distinct form of uncertainty calibrated to keep citizens’ need for closure persistently elevated.

5.1 Legal ambiguity

In electoral authoritarian regimes, anxiety is systematically produced through deliberate legal ambiguity, leaving citizens uncertain about the boundaries of permissible behavior and vulnerable to arbitrary state interventions. Vaguely worded statutes on “extremism,” “national security,” or “public morality” allow regimes to target dissent selectively while preserving the appearance of legality. Russia’s 2012 “foreign agent” law, expanded repeatedly since 2020, exemplifies this strategy: its broad and shifting criteria for designation—ranging from receiving foreign funding to engaging in undefined “political activity”—mean that journalists, NGOs, and ordinary citizens cannot reliably determine in advance whether their conduct will trigger sanction (Flikke, 2016; Skokova et al., 2018). Similarly, Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws have been applied to academics, journalists, and Kurdish politicians on the basis of social media posts, signed petitions, or attendance at public events, with prosecutorial discretion functioning as a tool of selective intimidation (Yilmaz, 2023).

Beyond formal statutes, electoral authoritarian regimes manufacture legal uncertainty through inconsistent enforcement and the weaponization of bureaucratic procedure. Tax inspections, licensing reviews, and zoning regulations are deployed as instruments of coercion against critics while ignored for loyalists, generating a pervasive sense that the law is not a stable framework of rules but an instrument that can be activated unpredictably against anyone. This unpredictability is the precise psychological condition that elevates the Need for Closure: when citizens cannot infer the rules of the game from observable behavior, they experience the kind of chronic ambiguity that Kruglanski and Webster (1996) identify as triggering seizing and freezing. Crucially, this strategy preserves the regime’s democratic façade: courts continue to function, laws are formally on the books, and prosecutions follow procedural form. The arbitrariness is hidden inside the appearance of legality.

5.2 Economic precarity

A second domain of manufactured anxiety is economic. Electoral authoritarian regimes deliberately maintain conditions of economic precarity, ensuring that citizens experience material insecurity as a structural feature of daily life. Unlike the resource-intensive clientelism discussed in Section 2, this strategy operates not through generous distribution but through the strategic withholding and conditional release of economic security. State employment, pensions, housing subsidies, and access to credit are channeled through patronage networks whose continued availability depends on political loyalty (Frye et al., 2014; Magaloni, 2006). Citizens come to understand that their material wellbeing is contingent not on stable institutional rights but on remaining within the regime’s good graces.

Hungary under Orbán illustrates this pattern: the systematic concentration of economic opportunity in regime-aligned networks has created a stratum of citizens whose livelihoods are directly tied to the ruling party’s continuity (Magyar, 2016; Scheiring, 2020). Russia’s economic governance similarly combines macroeconomic populism with micro-level precarity, where regional employment and social provision flow through political channels (Rosenfeld, 2017). The psychological effect of this arrangement is to translate economic uncertainty into political dependency: citizens facing chronic material insecurity are cognitively primed to seek closure, and the regime positions itself as the sole source of stability within an otherwise unpredictable economic landscape. Material anxiety thus becomes inseparable from political anxiety, and the closure that the regime offers is simultaneously material and ideological.

5.3 Geopolitical threat construction

The third and most rhetorically prominent domain of manufactured anxiety is geopolitical. Electoral authoritarian regimes routinely construct external threats—foreign powers, hostile civilizations, fifth columns—to generate a sense of national peril that demands collective vigilance. Russia’s framing of NATO encroachment, Ukrainian “Nazism,” and Western moral decadence; Turkey’s invocations of internal Gülenist conspiracies linked to foreign intelligence services; Hungary’s construction of George Soros as the orchestrator of migration crises and ideological subversion—all illustrate the strategic deployment of existential threat narratives (Krastev and Holmes, 2019; Yilmaz and Erturk, 2021). These narratives perform two complementary functions: they generate the diffuse anxiety that activates NFC, and they pre-package the closure-providing worldview that resolves it.

Geopolitical threat construction in electoral authoritarian regimes operates as a chronic background condition of existential alertness rather than as a discrete authorizing move directed at specific exceptional measures. The threat is permanent rather than emergent, and its function is psychological maintenance rather than policy authorization—a distinction from securitization theory (Buzan et al., 1998) developed systematically in Section 7.1. This permanent threat environment is consistent with what Greenberg et al. (1997) describe in TMT terms as the chronic activation of mortality salience: when citizens are persistently reminded of existential vulnerability, they become cognitively dependent on the cultural worldview that promises symbolic protection.

5.4 The architecture of compounded uncertainty

The three domains are not independent; they reinforce one another. Legal ambiguity makes economic precarity more threatening, because citizens cannot rely on legal protections for property or employment. Economic precarity makes geopolitical threats more salient, because materially insecure citizens are more receptive to narratives that locate the source of their hardship in external enemies (Kuran, 1995). And geopolitical threats justify both legal exceptions and economic intervention, completing the circuit. The cumulative effect is an architecture of compounded uncertainty in which anxiety is not produced once but continuously regenerated.

Crucially, this architecture is calibrated rather than maximal. Regimes seek to maintain anxiety at levels high enough to elevate NFC but not so high as to produce panic, withdrawal, or exit. The empirical signature of successful manufacturing is therefore not extreme fear but a steady background hum of unease, calibrated to keep citizens organizing their behavior around uncertainties they can never fully resolve. This calibrated anxiety is the precondition for the next stage of the process: the offering of a closure-providing patriotic narrative, which the following section examines in detail.

6 Constructing the closure-providing worldview

Manufactured anxiety alone does not produce political loyalty. As Section 3 established, NFC drives individuals to seize upon the first available coherent narrative that resolves their uncertainty; whether that narrative happens to be patriotic depends on what alternatives are accessible in the cognitive environment. Electoral authoritarian regimes therefore complement anxiety production with the careful construction of a narrative monopoly—an information environment in which the regime’s patriotic worldview is the most readily available, internally coherent, and emotionally resonant interpretation of the manufactured threats. This section examines how that worldview is constructed and why it succeeds in capturing closure-seeking citizens.

6.1 Narrative monopoly without total censorship

A defining feature of electoral authoritarianism is that, unlike closed totalitarian systems, it does not rely on the comprehensive suppression of alternative viewpoints. Independent newspapers continue to publish, opposition figures appear on talk shows, and foreign media remain accessible to those who seek them out. This pluralism is not a regime weakness but a strategic feature: visible dissent reinforces the democratic façade while the regime ensures that its own narrative dominates the channels through which most citizens actually consume information (Guriev and Treisman, 2019; Roberts, 2018).

The mechanism is asymmetric reach rather than total censorship. State-aligned media saturate prime-time television, social media feeds, and public space, while independent voices are pushed to the margins through a combination of ownership consolidation, advertising pressure, regulatory harassment, and selective prosecution. Roberts (2018) describes the analogous Chinese strategy as “porous censorship”: information control operates not by eliminating alternatives but by raising the friction of accessing them, ensuring that only the most motivated citizens will encounter dissenting interpretations. For the closure-seeking citizen, what matters is not whether alternative narratives exist but whether they are immediately and effortlessly available at the moment of cognitive need. When anxiety spikes—following an economic shock, a geopolitical incident, or a personal encounter with arbitrary state power—the regime’s narrative is the one waiting in the citizen’s media environment, ready to be seized upon.

6.2 The structural features of the closure-providing worldview

The narratives that authoritarian regimes construct share three structural features that make them particularly effective at providing cognitive closure. First, they are binary: the world is divided cleanly into in-group and out-group, patriots and traitors, defenders and threats. This binary structure eliminates the interpretive ambiguity that plagues more nuanced worldviews and offers immediate categorical clarity. Second, they are totalizing: the same explanatory framework accounts for foreign policy setbacks, domestic economic difficulties, cultural change, and personal misfortune, all of which can be traced to the machinations of identifiable enemies. Third, they are self-sealing: contradictory evidence is pre-interpreted as further proof of enemy deception, rendering the worldview cognitively immune to disconfirmation (Marcus, 2002).

Russian state media’s framing of the war in Ukraine illustrates all three features simultaneously. The conflict is binary (Russia versus a hostile West using Ukraine as proxy), totalizing (it explains sanctions, inflation, cultural pressure, and demographic anxiety within a single narrative), and self-sealing (Western reports of Russian military setbacks are reframed as evidence of Western information warfare, which itself becomes proof that the original narrative was correct). For citizens experiencing acute NFC, this triple structure is not a liability but a positive cognitive feature: it offers exactly the kind of total, unambiguous, disconfirmation-resistant interpretation that the closure-seeking mind craves.

6.3 Symbolic saturation and the banality of patriotism

Beyond explicit ideological narratives, the closure-providing worldview is sustained through what Billig (1995) terms “banal nationalism”—the routine, unnoticed reproduction of national identity through flags in classrooms, anthems before sporting events, currency iconography, weather maps, and sports commentary. In electoral authoritarian regimes, banal nationalism is intensified into what might be called symbolic saturation: the deliberate amplification of patriotic symbolism across everyday life such that no public space remains ideologically neutral. Russian schoolchildren begin the week with flag ceremonies and “Conversations about Important Things”; Turkish public buildings display oversized portraits of Atatürk alongside Erdoğan; Hungarian state media weaves references to historical national grievance into routine programming.

The function of symbolic saturation is not direct persuasion but ambient priming. Citizens need not consciously process each symbolic encounter; cumulatively, these encounters keep the patriotic worldview at the top of cognitive accessibility. When NFC is activated by a discrete anxiety-inducing event, the most cognitively accessible interpretive framework is the one that ambient symbols have been priming all along. This is why symbolic saturation works synergistically with manufactured anxiety: the former ensures that the regime’s narrative is always cognitively available, while the latter ensures that citizens are persistently motivated to reach for it.

6.4 Performative consensus and the spiral of conformity

A final element of worldview construction operates through visible public performance. Mass rallies, patriotic concerts, electoral landslides, and viral expressions of loyalty serve not primarily to convince skeptics but to demonstrate the apparent ubiquity of patriotic sentiment. Drawing on Kuran’s (1995) theory of preference falsification, citizens who observe widespread public expressions of loyalty—even if they privately suspect many such expressions are themselves performances—update their beliefs about the social distribution of opinion. The result is a spiral: the more visible the public consensus, the higher the perceived cost of private dissent, and the more each individual contributes to the consensus through their own outward conformity.

Wedeen’s (1999) analysis of Asad-era Syria captures the resulting condition: citizens come to act “as if” they believe the regime’s narratives, and this behavioral conformity, sustained collectively, produces effects functionally indistinguishable from genuine belief. For PSS specifically, the implication is that citizens entering the system already in a state of high NFC do not encounter an open field of competing narratives but a stage on which one narrative appears to enjoy overwhelming consensus. Seizing upon that narrative is not merely cognitively efficient but socially safe, and the convergence of cognitive economy with social pressure makes the regime’s worldview the path of least resistance for the closure-seeking mind.

The architecture is now complete on the input side: anxiety has elevated NFC, the information environment has restricted the supply of alternative narratives, the regime’s narrative has been engineered for closure-providing efficiency, and visible consensus has lowered the social cost of adoption. Yet for PSS to consolidate, citizens must do more than passively absorb the worldview—they must locate themselves within it as agents, deriving self-esteem and a sense of empowerment from active participation in its defense. The next section turns to this final and most distinctive component of the framework: empowerment-based patriotism.

7 Empowerment-based patriotism: from worldview to agency

Yet a worldview that merely organizes information remains psychologically incomplete. What TMT identifies as the second component of the cultural anxiety buffer, self-esteem, requires that citizens locate themselves as valued agents within the constructed narrative (Greenberg et al., 1997). This section argues that empowerment-based patriotism is precisely the mechanism through which electoral authoritarian regimes supply this agentic component, completing the conversion of passive worldview adoption into active loyalty.

7.1 The logic of empowerment

Empowerment-based patriotism reframes the political relationship between citizen and regime. In coercive and indoctrinated forms of patriotization, the citizen is positioned as a subject—obedient, receptive, deferential. In empowerment-based patriotism, by contrast, the citizen is positioned as a defender: an active participant whose vigilance, voice, and vote are essential to protecting the nation against the threats the regime has rendered chronically salient. This repositioning is psychologically powerful because it converts the experience of anxiety from a passive condition into an actionable mandate. The citizen is no longer merely afraid; they are mobilized. The same uncertainty that drove them to seize upon the regime’s narrative now provides them with a meaningful role within it.

The reframing operates through what Bandura (1997) terms collective efficacy: the belief that one’s group, acting together, can produce desired outcomes in the face of shared threats. By inviting citizens to see themselves as participants in a collective defensive project, the regime supplies a sense of efficacy that compensates for the political powerlessness citizens objectively experience. Crucially, this efficacy is symbolic rather than substantive. Citizens are empowered to perform loyalty, not to alter policy. But for the closure-seeking mind already committed to the regime’s worldview, the experience of symbolic empowerment is functionally equivalent to political agency, and the distinction between performing defense and exercising power is precisely what the framework is designed to obscure.

7.2 Voting as ritual affirmation

Elections in electoral authoritarian regimes are routinely analyzed as legitimacy theater directed at international audiences (Schedler, 2006; Simpser, 2013). The PSS framework adds a complementary domestic-psychological function: elections operate as ritual affirmations through which citizens enact and reinforce their identification with the regime’s worldview. Voting under PSS is not primarily an instrument for selecting policy but a participatory ceremony in which the citizen materially performs the role of defender that the worldview assigns them.

Russian elections illustrate this dynamic: turnout is mobilized through patriotic appeals framing the act of voting as resistance to foreign interference, with the ballot itself serving as a token of national solidarity (Frye et al., 2017; Rosenfeld, 2017). Turkish elections under Erdoğan have similarly been framed as existential battles in which voting for the ruling party is rhetorically equated with defending the nation against Gülenist conspirators, Kurdish separatists, and Western powers (Esen and Gumuscu, 2016). For the citizen experiencing PSS, the act of voting accomplishes three psychological functions simultaneously: it discharges the anxiety the regime has manufactured (by enacting protective agency), it consolidates the worldview (by participating in its public performance), and it produces self-esteem (by confirming the citizen’s role as defender). These three functions are mutually reinforcing, which is why electoral participation under PSS is often more enthusiastic than its objective political stakes would warrant.

This analysis explains a long-standing puzzle in the electoral authoritarianism literature: why citizens turn out at high rates to vote in elections whose outcomes are largely predetermined. Standard accounts emphasize coercion, mobilization machines, or expressive identity (Magaloni, 2006; Frye et al., 2014). PSS suggests an additional pathway: voting is psychologically gratifying because it resolves manufactured anxiety, and citizens whose equilibrium depends on the regime’s worldview have intrinsic motivation to participate in its central ritual.

7.3 The outsourcing of coercion

Perhaps the most consequential implication of empowerment-based patriotism is what I term the outsourcing of coercion. As PSS consolidates within a population, the function of monitoring and punishing dissent is progressively transferred from state institutions to ordinary citizens. Citizens whose psychological equilibrium depends on the regime’s worldview remaining unchallenged have intrinsic motivation to identify, denounce, and ostracize those who articulate alternative interpretations.

The mechanism is psychological rather than instrumental. Unlike informants motivated by material incentives or fear, PSS-driven enforcers act because the existence of dissent is itself psychologically threatening: dissent signals the contingency of the worldview they have seized upon, and contingency reopens the very ambiguity that NFC was activated to resolve. Defending the worldview from external challenge is therefore not a service performed for the regime but a defense of the citizen’s own cognitive equilibrium. This is why PSS-driven enforcement tends to be most aggressive in interpersonal contexts—family disputes, workplace conflicts, social media exchanges—where the dissenting voice is closest and therefore most psychologically destabilizing.

In contemporary Russia, the phenomenon of citizens denouncing teachers, neighbors, or family members for “discrediting the armed forces” exemplifies this dynamic. Reports from Turkey similarly document the social pressure exercised by AKP-aligned citizens against secular or Kurdish neighbors, often in the absence of any direct state instruction (Yilmaz, 2023). In each case, the citizen acts not as a paid agent of the regime but as a defender of a worldview whose stability is psychologically essential to them.

The outsourcing of coercion produces three significant consequences for regime durability. It reduces the regime’s reliance on visible repressive infrastructure, thereby preserving the democratic façade. It distributes enforcement across the population in ways that no formal security apparatus could replicate, because PSS-driven enforcers are present in every workplace, classroom, and family. And it transforms dissent from a confrontation between citizen and state into a confrontation between dissenting citizen and conforming citizen, displacing the political cost of repression from the regime onto interpersonal social fabric. This transformation is the deepest structural achievement of PSS: it produces a society in which authoritarian governance is enacted not primarily by the state but by citizens upon one another.

A potential objection is that empowerment-based patriotism does not harm citizens who feel themselves to be exercising genuine agency. The framework rejects this subjective welfare standard. Drawing on the republican tradition (Pettit, 1997; Skinner, 1998), freedom requires the absence of arbitrary domination, and PSS produces precisely such domination: preferences are formed within an information environment the regime controls, in response to anxieties it manufactures, oriented toward enemies it designates. The fact that this preference formation feels autonomous is not evidence of freedom but evidence of the framework’s success. Furthermore, the seizing-and-freezing dynamic disables the deliberative revision of belief that democratic theory presupposes (Habermas, 1996; Christiano, 2008): citizens become cognitively resistant to disconfirming information not because they have evaluated and rejected it but because evaluation itself threatens psychological equilibrium. PSS thus preserves the procedural form of democratic citizenship while hollowing out its substantive content.

8 Analytical distinctness, empirical strategy, and scope conditions

Having developed the PSS framework in full, this section addresses three questions essential to its analytical viability. First, how does PSS differ from adjacent concepts in the existing literature on authoritarian politics? Second, under what conditions does the framework apply, and where does it not? Third, how could the framework be empirically tested? Addressing these questions transforms PSS from a theoretical construct into a falsifiable research program.

8.1 Analytical distinctness from adjacent concepts

PSS overlaps with several established concepts but reduces to none of them. The four comparisons that follow address two kinds of adjacent frameworks. Manipulation, indoctrination, and securitization are top-down accounts in which the causal engine resides in regime action; PSS is distinguished from these primarily by relocating the causal engine to the citizen’s own cognition. System justification is itself a bottom-up framework and must therefore be distinguished from PSS on other dimensions, since the two share a citizen-cognition causal structure.

Manipulation and propaganda. Classical theories of political manipulation locate the causal force in the strategic actor who deceives or persuades a comparatively passive audience (Stanley, 2015; Jowett and O’Donnell, 2018). PSS departs from this model by locating the causal engine in the citizen’s autonomous Need for Closure response: the regime supplies anxiety and narrative, but the conversion into durable loyalty occurs in the citizen’s own cognition. Two divergent empirical implications follow. PSS predicts that citizens will defend the regime’s narrative even when the regime itself contradicts it, because their attachment is to the closure the narrative provides rather than to current messaging. It also predicts that exposure to counter-propaganda will often strengthen rather than weaken loyalty, because such exposure reactivates the ambiguity that closure was sought to resolve. Standard manipulation theories predict the opposite on both counts.

Indoctrination. As discussed in Section 2, indoctrination treats the citizen as a passive vessel of state ideology, requiring intensive socialization through monopolized institutions over long time horizons. PSS operates without these requirements: it can consolidate rapidly in adult populations encountering manufactured anxiety for the first time, and it does not depend on prior ideological saturation. Empirically, PSS should therefore be observable in citizens who lacked patriotic commitments earlier in life and underwent rapid attitudinal change during periods of acute anxiety—a pattern conventional indoctrination accounts cannot easily explain.

Securitization. Of the top-down frameworks, securitization theory (Buzan et al., 1998) is the closest analytical neighbor: both recognize that existential threat construction generates compliance, and both emphasize the discursive production of enemies. The differences are nonetheless substantial. Securitization is event-bounded and top-down, focused on the elite speech act that authorizes specific exceptional measures, after which routine politics resumes. PSS is chronic and bottom-up, requiring permanent low-grade anxiety distributed across multiple domains and focused on the citizen’s autonomous cognitive response. Securitization explains policy authorization; PSS explains psychological capture. A regime can engage in securitization without producing PSS (if anxiety remains episodic), and PSS can persist after a securitizing crisis has formally ended (because the cognitive attachment outlives the event that produced it). The two frameworks are complementary rather than competing.

System justification. The remaining comparison is structurally distinct because System Justification Theory (Jost and Banaji, 1994; Jost, 2020) also locates the source of regime support in citizens’ autonomous psychology. SJT holds that individuals defend existing arrangements to reduce the dissonance produced by their own subordination, and PSS shares its prediction that disadvantaged citizens may actively support the systems that disadvantage them. Precisely because the two share a bottom-up causal structure, distinguishing them requires attending to how that engine operates rather than where it resides. The mechanisms differ on three dimensions: temporal dynamics (chronic disposition versus crisis-activated response), motivational structure (dissonance reduction versus Need for Closure), and relational logic (defending the system as it is versus defending the regime as rescuer from manufactured chaos). The frameworks therefore make divergent predictions: SJT expects loyalty to peak under perceived institutional stability, PSS under engineered threat. Both may operate simultaneously within a population, but they capture different layers of the citizen-regime relationship and can be empirically disentangled by tracking how loyalty responds to engineered crisis.

8.2 Behavioral signatures of PSS

For PSS to function as more than a theoretical construct, it must generate observable predictions distinct from those of competing accounts. I identify five behavioral signatures that, jointly, should mark the presence of PSS in a population.

First, anxiety-loyalty correlation: citizens exposed to higher levels of legal, economic, or geopolitical uncertainty should display higher levels of patriotic identification, reversing the standard finding that insecurity erodes regime support. Second, disconfirmation resistance: PSS-affected citizens should respond to evidence contradicting the regime’s narrative not with belief revision but with intensified defense, consistent with the freezing component of NFC. Third, voluntary enforcement: the framework predicts spontaneous denunciation and ostracism of dissenters in interpersonal contexts, occurring without state instruction or material reward. Fourth, ritual gratification: participation in patriotic rituals such as voting should produce measurable affect regulation—reductions in self-reported anxiety following participation—rather than merely instrumental satisfaction. Fifth, cognitive cost of exit: citizens identified as PSS-affected should report psychological distress when exposed to alternative worldviews, distinct from the discomfort produced by ordinary political disagreement.

These five signatures jointly distinguish PSS from manipulation (which would not predict signatures two or five), from clientelism (which would not predict signatures one, three, or four), and from genuine ideological commitment (which would not predict signature five, since true believers welcome rather than resist intellectual engagement with their convictions).

8.3 Empirical strategy

Testing PSS requires methodological pluralism, since no single research design can simultaneously capture the cognitive mechanism, the behavioral signatures identified in Section 7.2, and the scope conditions specified above. I outline four complementary strategies, each suited to a different subset of the signatures.

Survey experiments offer the most direct route to testing the first signature (anxiety-loyalty correlation) and the core seizing component of the underlying mechanism. Manipulating perceived ambiguity through priming tasks varying legal, economic, or geopolitical uncertainty, and measuring subsequent shifts in patriotic identification, narrative endorsement, and tolerance for alternative viewpoints, would isolate the predicted causal pathway. Existing instruments measuring dispositional Need for Closure (Webster and Kruglanski, 1994) allow examination of the predicted heterogeneity across individuals: high-NFC respondents should display the strongest anxiety-loyalty coupling.

Longitudinal panel studies are essential for testing the second signature (disconfirmation resistance) and the freezing component of NFC, both of which require observing whether citizens’ worldviews become progressively resistant to disconfirmation over time. Panel data from contexts experiencing escalating anxiety—Russian respondents tracked across the 2014–2022 period, or Turkish respondents across the post-2016 period—would allow direct examination of the predicted trajectory. Pre-post designs around major patriotic events, combined with experience-sampling methods, can additionally test the fourth signature (ritual gratification) by measuring whether participation in patriotic rituals produces the predicted reductions in self-reported anxiety.

Qualitative and ethnographic research is necessary to capture the third signature (voluntary enforcement) and the phenomenology underlying the fifth (cognitive cost of exit), neither of which is well captured by survey or experimental methods. Following the example of Wedeen (1999), close engagement with everyday political talk, family disputes, and workplace interactions can document the bottom-up enforcement that quantitative methods cannot easily detect, while ethnographic attention to the experience of doubt among citizens beginning to disengage from the regime narrative can illuminate the distinctive distress that distinguishes PSS from ordinary ideological commitment.

Comparative case studies across electoral authoritarian regimes—Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela—operate at a different scale, testing whether variation in anxiety architecture and narrative coordination produces variation in PSS prevalence consistent with the framework’s predictions. Such studies should attend particularly to contrasting cases where the institutional configuration is similar but PSS appears to differ in scale, identifying the conditions that make some electoral authoritarian populations more susceptible than others.

Together, these methods constitute a tractable research program. The framework’s value as a contribution to the literature on authoritarian durability ultimately depends on whether its predictions survive systematic empirical examination.

8.4 Scope conditions

The framework does not claim to explain all forms of authoritarian support, and three sets of scope conditions specify its applicable domain.

Individual-level conditions. PSS operates most powerfully on citizens with elevated dispositional Need for Closure, a trait that varies across individuals and life stages (Webster and Kruglanski, 1994). Citizens with high tolerance for ambiguity, strong alternative meaning systems (such as religious or transnational identifications), or robust independent information networks should be substantially less susceptible. The framework therefore predicts heterogeneous rather than uniform effects across populations: PSS should be most pronounced among citizens who are simultaneously exposed to manufactured anxiety, lacking alternative closure-providing frameworks, and dispositionally inclined toward certainty-seeking.

Regime-level conditions. PSS requires the specific institutional configuration of electoral authoritarianism: regimes must possess the capacity to engineer multi-domain anxiety, control the narrative environment without imposing total censorship, and stage participatory rituals that absorb empowerment-seeking behavior. Closed totalitarian systems lack the participatory rituals; consolidated democracies lack the capacity for systematic anxiety manufacture; failing states lack the narrative coordination required to channel anxiety into loyalty. The framework is therefore explicitly bounded by regime type and should not be expected to travel beyond the electoral authoritarian category.

Temporal conditions. PSS is not a permanent equilibrium but a dynamic process subject to decay. Sustained material catastrophe can overwhelm the framework’s anxiety-management function, producing collapse rather than consolidation, as Suharto’s fall in 1998 illustrates. Generational succession may erode PSS as cohorts socialized after the consolidating crisis lack the foundational anxiety experience. And exposure to alternative meaning systems through migration, cross-border information flows, or religious revival may supply competing sources of closure that displace the regime’s narrative. The framework therefore predicts that PSS is most stable during the middle phases of a regime’s anxiety-management cycle and most vulnerable at its temporal margins.

9 Conclusion

This paper has developed Patriotic Stockholm Syndrome (PSS) as a framework for explaining how electoral authoritarian regimes sustain popular support without the visible coercion that would compromise their democratic façade, the comprehensive indoctrination that would betray their ideological pluralism, or the costly clientelism that would render them fragile to economic shocks. The framework’s central claim is that such regimes resolve the paradox of patriotization—the need for support that appears voluntary while functioning as compulsion—by manufacturing the psychological conditions under which citizens autonomously generate the bonds of compliance themselves.

The argument proceeds through three analytical moves. The regime engineers chronic anxiety across legal, economic, and geopolitical domains, calibrated to keep citizens’ Need for Closure persistently elevated without producing panic or exit. It then constructs a narrative environment in which its patriotic worldview is the most cognitively accessible, structurally coherent, and socially endorsed interpretive framework available. Finally, it supplies empowerment-based patriotism as the agentic component of that worldview, allowing citizens to convert passive acceptance into active defense and thereby restore the sense of efficacy that manufactured anxiety has stripped from them.

The distinctive contribution lies not in any single component but in the integration of three independently established psychological mechanisms—Need for Closure, Terror Management, and trauma bonding—into a coherent account of electoral authoritarian durability. Where existing literatures treat authoritarian support as the product of either top-down manipulation or instrumental calculation, PSS locates the engine of compliance in citizens’ own cognitive responses to engineered conditions. The regime does not implant loyalty; it creates the circumstances under which loyalty is the most psychologically economical response, and the citizen does the rest. This bottom-up architecture is what allows the resulting support to be voluntary in its phenomenology and involuntary in its structural production.

Three broader implications follow. First, the framework reframes the standard debate about authoritarian legitimacy. The question is not whether citizens “really” support the regime, since the dichotomy between authentic and manufactured belief presupposes a stable referent that PSS dissolves. Citizens experiencing PSS genuinely believe their patriotism, and the genuineness of that belief is itself the regime’s achievement. Research on authoritarian legitimacy should therefore attend less to the surface measurement of support and more to the conditions under which preferences are formed.

Second, the framework illuminates a structural transformation in how contemporary authoritarianism reproduces itself. The outsourcing of coercion described in Section 6 represents a qualitative shift away from the state-centric repressive architectures of twentieth-century authoritarianism: contemporary regimes increasingly delegate enforcement to PSS-affected citizens whose psychological equilibrium depends on suppressing alternative worldviews. Resistance to such regimes therefore cannot be theorized solely as a confrontation between citizen and state; it must also address the interpersonal social fabric through which authoritarian governance is now enacted.

Third, the framework carries implications for democratic theory beyond the electoral authoritarian context. The seizing-and-freezing dynamics PSS exploits are ordinary properties of human cognition under uncertainty, not exotic features of authoritarian populations. Democracies experiencing prolonged crisis, polarized media ecosystems, or sustained elite manipulation of threat perception may develop attenuated forms of the same closure-seeking dynamics, with corresponding consequences for the deliberative capacities on which democratic citizenship depends. The boundary between democratic and authoritarian political psychology is more porous than institutional definitions of regime type imply, and the cognitive preconditions of democratic life require active protection rather than merely formal preservation.

Significant work remains. The empirical agenda outlined in Section 7 requires sustained collaboration across survey research, longitudinal panel design, comparative case study, and ethnographic engagement. The boundary between PSS and adjacent forms of political psychology—populist identification, religious nationalism, charismatic attachment—requires further specification, particularly where multiple frameworks operate simultaneously within the same population. The temporal dynamics of PSS decay demand particular attention in light of recent challenges to electoral authoritarian regimes whose populations show signs of shifting away from the patriotic worldviews that long sustained them.

What the framework offers, ultimately, is an account of how authoritarian regimes can transform the act of submission into an experience of agency. The achievement of PSS is to produce citizens who do not merely tolerate their political confinement but actively defend it as the architecture of their own freedom. Understanding how anxiety becomes loyalty, how loyalty becomes enforcement, and how enforcement becomes self-administered is essential to understanding why contemporary authoritarianism has proven so resilient, and what intellectual and political resources are required to address it.

StatementsData availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

MW: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The author(s) declared that Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. ChatGpt 4.o was used to editing the grammar of part of the text.

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Summary

Keywords

anxiety, electoral authoritarianism, need for closure, patriotism, trauma bonding

Citation

Wong MY (2026) Patriotic Stockholm Syndrome in the era of electoral authoritarianism. Front. Polit. Sci. 8:1810788. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1810788

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© 2026 Wong.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Muk Yan Wong, mywong@hsu.edu.hk

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All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.