How Superior Authority Cultivates Public Rage to Legitimize Ruling Regimes

Abstract

Authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes across the globe have historically deployed strategic emotional governance as a mechanism of political legitimation. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) examining the relationship between state-orchestrated public rage and regime legitimacy across political, sociological, and communication studies disciplines. Drawing on 74 peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024 and indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and JSTOR, this review synthesizes empirical and theoretical frameworks through which superior authorities — defined as states, ruling elites, and dominant political institutions — cultivate, direct, and instrumentalize collective anger to stabilize and justify their governance. The analysis identifies five core mechanisms: enemy construction and scapegoating, media manipulation and emotional priming, nationalist emotional scripts, crisis manufacturing, and institutional rage normalization. Findings reveal that manufactured rage functions not merely as a byproduct of political instability but as an engineered governing technology embedded in regime survival strategies. This paper contributes a cross-disciplinary synthesized framework — the Rage-Legitimation Cycle (RLC) — advancing understanding of emotional authoritarianism in the 21st century. Implications for political science, communication studies, and civil society are discussed.