The paper examines occurrence and reasons behind the persistence of authoritarian value orientations in Montenegrin society three decades after the democratic transition. The author analyses the data obtained from public opinion polls by using the F-scale and other methods of measuring inclination towards authoritarianism. The conclusion reached was that a high degree of authoritarian values recorded in Yugoslavia during the 1970s was continuously reproduced in the post-Yugoslav countries. The research conducted by the author herself in 2013 showed that although the tendency towards authoritarianism is lower among younger and more educated citizens of Montenegro, respondents with a high degree of authoritarianism still predominate in all social groups. The persistence of authoritarian values in Montenegro and other post-Yugoslav countries (especially Serbia) is explained by a number of socio-cultural factors – not only the legacy of socialism, but also the rural society tradition and reaction to the crisis of recent decades. The regularities observed in the Montenegrin case are not typical only for the post-Yugoslav era, but probably for all the post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia.