Journal of Democracy

Abstract:

Over the past decade, the narrative of competence that Putin established during his first two presidential terms was steadily undermined as the quality of governance worsened. Since 2012, the regime has gradually been relying less on persuasion and more on generating fear in its population—a trend that has accelerated in the face of Russian military failures in Ukraine. That ill-fated war now risks the complete annihilation of the myth of autocratic competence. The Russian example demonstrates the importance of identifying and analyzing changes in the quality of autocracies, and calls for a better understanding of why autocracies become more reliant on violent repression than on spinning an informational narrative of legitimacy and competence.