Why do citizens cooperate with a state that mistreats them? And why does that cooperation look so different from one place to the next?

In The Social Roots of Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024), Natalia Forrat offers a new framework for understanding how authoritarian power works at the grassroots level. Drawing on fieldwork across four Russian regions, she identifies two distinct models of authoritarianism rooted in how societies view the state. Where people see the state as their collective team leader, regimes consolidate through social conformity and solidarity. Where they see it as an outsider, regimes rely on clientelist bargains and transactional loyalty. These aren't just different flavors of the same thing — they produce fundamentally different political machines, electoral control patterns, and implications for what democratization would require.

Forrat’s theory challenges the use of conventional categories of competitive politics to understand authoritarianism. She shows that when a group bond between citizens and the state is present, state-society relations are driven not by competition among different groups seeking to use state resources to their advantage but by the collective pursuit of a just state and the conflict between this ideal and the reality of a repressive state. For democracy practitioners, the book carries an important implication: because different types of authoritarianism lack different elements of democracy, support efforts may need to set different goals and target different institutions depending on the kind of authoritarian society they are engaging with.