Society & Politics
10 d

Are you familiar with "Patriotic Stockholm syndrome"?

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. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2026.1810788/full

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10 d
Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people develop feelings of loyalty, sympathy, or affection toward someone who mistreats or controls them. Instead of recognizing that person as the source of their suffering, they may defend that person's behavior and even become hostile toward anyone who criticizes it.

Are you familiar with "Patriotic Stockholm syndrome"?
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