ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Politics of Technology
This article is part of the Research TopicGlobal Perspectives on Cyber Statecraft: Bridging Theory and PracticeView all articles
The Service Doctrine: How Intelligence Mandates Shape National Cybersecurity Ecosystems
Provisionally accepted
- 1Széchenyi István University, Gyor, Hungary
- 2The Ministry of Education, Research, Development and Youth of the Slovak Republic, Bratislava, Slovakia
- 3Zilinska univerzita v Ziline, Žilina, Slovakia
- 4The Pennsylvania State University Penn State Law, University Park, United States
- 5St Luke's University Health Network, Bethlehem, United States
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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 centralised, 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 centralising 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.
Keywords: Central-Eastern Europe, cooperative vs monocratic cybersecurity, Cybersecurity governance, digital sovereignty, most-different-systems design, national security, Public trust
Received: 18 Nov 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kelemen, Bucko, Mazuch, Squillace, Capella and Szabó. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roland Kelemen
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