Do citizens support authoritarian regimes and if yes, is this support sincere or conditional on the regime’s performance? Does this support help regimes to survive national crises? Despite the potentially important role of citizens to stabilize regimes, to this point, relatively little is known about the various attitudes that motivate citizens to cooperate with the state in autocracies. Building on the work of Easton (1965), we propose a unified research framework that conceptualizes the complex relationship between autocrats and their subjects. Our framework proposes a dual distinction between conditional (specific) and sincere (diffuse) support for the ruling regime. We expect that in times of (political or economic) crisis, the loyalty of sincere supporters remains unwavering, ensuring the resilience of the regime. However, regimes might be challenged by conditional supporters during crises once they lose their grip on economic performance or signalling political competence. We test our conceptual framework of citizen’s support for autocracies using Turkey as a case study. Firstly, we use existing longitudinal data during the 2016 political and 2018 economic crises, modelling support for the regime parties as a function of proxies for sincere and conditional support over time. Secondly, to increase the internal validity of our findings, we field several original experiments (list as well as framing experiments), recruiting Turkish participants from Facebook and Instagram using online advertisement. Our results demonstrate the greater durability of sincere support compared to conditional support in times of crisis.