The Theory of Emotional Autocracy: How Regimes Rule Through Fear, Hope, and Relief, Volume 2

The most consequential rulers of our time do not govern through fear alone. They govern through feeling - manufacturing anxiety, curating hope, and orchestrating relief with sufficient precision to make populations emotionally dependent on the leaders who engineered the danger in the first place.This book tests that argument against the evidence. Examining four of the defining political cases of the early twenty-first century - Putin's Russia, Orbán's Hungary, Erdoğan's Turkey, and Modi's India - it traces in detail how emotional autocracy works in practice: how threats are constructed and timed, how hope is calibrated and withheld, how crises are staged and resolved, and how digital technology has transformed the precision with which governments can monitor and manipulate the emotional lives of entire populations.Drawing on process tracing across a range of primary and comparative cases, the book establishes that emotional autocracy is not a temporary aberration or the product of skillful leaders. It is a structurally enabled governing logic whose conditions are deepening. And it argues that the democratic responses most commonly proposed - fact-checking, institutional reform, better information - are insufficient against a mode of rule that operates not on what citizens think but on how they feel.The frightened citizen who feels rescued, the anxious nation that finds its protector, the people who cannot imagine safety without the leader who manufactured the danger - these are not the failures of democracy. They are its most urgent political problem. This book is the first systematic empirical account of how that problem is produced, and what it will take to address it.