The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is thrilled to congratulate Hoover Fellows and CDDRL affiliated scholars Erin Baggott Carter and Brett L. Carter on receiving the William H. Riker Book Award presented by the American Political Science Association’s Political Economy section. The award honors the best book on political economy published in the past three years and recognizes the Carters’ recent work, Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Propaganda in Autocracies offers a groundbreaking account of how and why authoritarian regimes deploy propaganda. It draws on the first global dataset of authoritarian propaganda, analyzing nearly eight million newspaper articles across 59 countries. The book reveals how autocrats strategically craft narratives to secure their rule, and why propaganda varies so dramatically across contexts — from Russian invocations of Donald Trump to the sweeping state narratives of contemporary China.

Reflecting on the honor, Brett Carter emphasized the project’s roots at Stanford: “It goes without saying that we deeply value the wonderful CDDRL community where this project began so many years ago. This is very much a CDDRL book. We began it when I was a postdoctoral fellow and worked through the book’s key ideas over the course of several seminar presentations.”