The service doctrine: How intelligence mandates shape national cybersecurity ecosystems?

This study provides a structured comparative analysis of how democratic and authoritarian regimes integrate cybersecurity into their national security architectures, with particular attention to the severely under-researched Central-Eastern European EU member states (Hungary and Slovakia). Using a most-different-systems design, the article contrasts the multi-stakeholder, cooperative model of a major rule-of-law democracy (United States) with the centralized, digital-sovereignty-driven approaches of three major authoritarian powers (China, Russia, Iran) and two smaller EU members. In addition to institutional structures and oversight mechanisms, the analysis explicitly incorporates public trust dynamics as a critical variable of cybersecurity resilience. Findings show that democratic systems generate higher legitimacy but slower operational tempo, whereas authoritarian models achieve rapid capability integration at the expense of societal trust and private-sector autonomy. In the Central-Eastern European cases, the interplay of NIS2 obligations and pronounced centralizing tendencies produces distinctive governance patterns that deviate from both the classic “cooperating cyberfare state” and the “smart total-control” archetypes. The study demonstrates that sustained public trust—fostered through transparent communication, accountable institutions and meaningful societal inclusion—acts as a force multiplier for cybersecurity resilience across all regime types. By filling three identified gaps (small EU member states, cross-regime empirical depth, and public-trust integration), the article advances both the comparative politics of cybersecurity governance and practical policy recommendations for strengthening transatlantic and intra-EU cyber resilience.