Chapter 6 tests the generalizability of the book’s analytic framework beyond the Russian case. Examining cross-national opinion data from forty-two electoral autocracies in the 1981-2014 period, drawn from the European and World Values Surveys (EVS, 2011; WVS, 2014) – the broadest available comparative dataset on popular sentiments about politics – it finds that just as in Russia, electoral authoritarian incumbents from across the globe have exploited traumas resulting from unmanageable turmoil in order to reconfigure mass opinion and political competition in their favor. Chapter 6 also shows that this cleavage structure and logic of vote choice differs from those of stable Western democracies, confirming again that the advantages electoral autocracies enjoy at the polls are largely owing to the extraordinarily subversive power of the elected strongman appeal in troubled societies.

Chapter 5 introduces the analysis of popular opinion in electoral autocracies with a comparative analysis of the paradigmatic case of Russia. The chapter first outlines the scope and consequences of Russia’s catastrophic post-Communist cataclysm, and how this traumatic experience prompted ordinary Russians to place an absolute premium on restoring order and stability – outlooks that made Vladimir Putin’s tough-mannered style of governing incredibly popular. Using a uniquely rich dataset of 418 surveys for the 1993-2011 period, produced by Russia’s Levada Center, this chapter demonstrates that in societies traumatized by upheaval, the strongman appeal trumps ideological, programmatic, and value orientations, and aligns mass opinion and political competition along a new cleavage: the choice of whether to accept or reject electoral authoritarianism as a regime that can impose order. I show that this cleavage inhibits and divides the opposition and highlights its shortcomings, allowing even weakly performing autocracies to retain power through elections.