A dictator's power is secure, the authors begin in this muscular, impressive study, only as long as citizens believe in it. When citizens suddenly believe otherwise, a dictator's power is anything but, as the Soviet Union's collapse revealed. This conviction – that power rests ultimately on citizens' beliefs – compels the world's autocrats to invest in sophisticated propaganda. This study draws on the first global data set of autocratic propaganda, encompassing nearly eight million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. The authors document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and its opponents, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it. The book explains why Russian President Vladimir uses Donald Trump as a propaganda tool and why Chinese state propaganda is more effusive than any point since the Cultural Revolution.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Erin Baggott Carter (赵雅芬) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is also a non-resident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center. She has previously held fellowships at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies, explores how political institutions determine propaganda strategies with an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.

Brett Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Brett received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and has previously held fellowships at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Brett's research focuses on politics in the world's autocracies. His first book, Propaganda in Autocracies, marshals a range of empirical evidence to probe the politics of autocratic propaganda. His second book project, Autocracy in Post-Cold War Africa, explores how Central Africa's autocrats are learning to survive despite the nominally democratic institutions they confront and the international pressure that occasionally makes outright repression costly. His other work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and Journal of Democracy, among others.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Just how bad is the current danger of democratic backsliding in the US and around the world?

Influential voices contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is, in fact, at or near an all-time high. The current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual and is well-explained by the income levels of existing democracies. Historical data yield extremely low estimated hazards of democratic breakdown in the US—considerably lower than in any democracy that has failed. Western governments are seen as threatened by a supposed decline in popular support for democracy and an erosion of elite norms. But the evidence for these claims is sparse. While deteriorating democratic quality in some countries is indeed a cause for concern, available evidence suggests that alarm about a global slide into autocracy is exaggerated.

Daniel Treisman is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and Interim Director of UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, he has published six books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals, as well as numerous commentaries in public affairs journals and the press. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption. 

A former co-editor of The American Political Science Review, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has consulted for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and he is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton University Press, 2022), has been translated into 13 languages and won the Prix Guido et Maruccia Zerilli-Marimo of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 23, 2023.

Given the rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders in Eastern Europe over the past decade, did the EU and NATO enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism? How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shape the trajectory of liberalism in the region?

EU and NATO accession gave momentum to Eastern Europe’s democratic and capitalist development, despite the many domestic political challenges associated with this dual transition. Given the subsequent rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders over the past decade, and given violations of democratic norms, did the specific process of enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism and so-called European values? Moreover, how does the Ukraine war fit into a trajectory of liberal development in Eastern Europe? These are the questions addressed in this presentation.

Hilary Appel is Podlich Family Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Appel has published numerous books and articles on the politics of economic reform in Russia and Eastern Europe in leading scholarly journals like World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Review of International Political Economy, Post-Soviet Affairs, East European Politics and Societies, and others.

Her co-authored book with Mitchell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Post-Communist Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2018), won the Silver Medal Laura Shannon Prize for Best Book in European Studies 2018-2019. Prof. Appel has received national fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Institute for the Study of World Politics.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 5, 2023.

Over the past century, we have explored the solar system, split the atom, and wired the Earth, but somehow, despite all of our technical prowess, we have struggled to understand something far more important: our own cultural differences. Using a variety of methodologies, our research has uncovered is that many cultural differences reflect a simple, but often invisible distinction: The strength of social norms. Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The tightness or looseness of social norms turns out to be a Rosetta Stone for human groups. It illuminates similar patterns of difference across nations, states, organizations, and social class, and the template also explains differences among traditional societies. It’s also a global fault line: conflicts we encounter can spring from the structural stress of tight-loose tension. By unmasking culture to reveal tight-loose dynamics, we can see fresh patterns in history, illuminate some of today’s most puzzling trends and events, and see our own behavior in a new light. At a time of intense political conflict and rapid social change, this template shows us that there is indeed a method to the madness, and that moderation – not tight or loose extremes – has never been more needed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business School and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her work has been published in outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Nature Human behavior, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, among others. Gelfand is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management and co-founder of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution. She received the 2016 Diener award from SPSP, the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2019 Outstanding Cultural Psychology Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2020 Rubin Theory-to-Practice award from the International Association of Conflict Management, the 2021 Contributions to Society award from the Academy of Management, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation. Gelfand was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

In its 2023 "Freedom in the World" report, Freedom House detected signs of a possible "turning point" away from the steady trend of receding freedom over the past decade and a half. For the first time since 2006, about as many countries gained in freedom as declined, and the egregious mistakes of authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran exposed "the limits of [these] authoritarian models." Illiberal populists suffered electoral defeats in several European Countries, including the Czech Republic earlier this year, showing that this model can be beaten at the polls. Yet press freedom and civil liberties continue to recede in India, Erdogan has been "reelected" in Turkey, and democracy is under significant pressure from populist and other authoritarian forces in Latin America and Africa. How should we interpret these diverse trends? Is the world still in a "democratic recession"?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. He leads the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. At FSI, he leads the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, based at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for more than six years. He also co-leads with (Eileen Donahoe) the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest edited book (with Orville Schell), China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), urges a posture of constructive vigilance toward China’s global projection of “sharp power,” which it sees as a rising threat to democratic norms and institutions. He offers a massive open online course (MOOC) on Comparative Democratic Development through the edX platform and is now writing a textbook to accompany it.

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The world’s dictators are no longer content with shoring up control over their own populations—they are now exploiting the openness of the free world to spread disinformation, sow discord, and suppress dissent. In Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power, editors William J. Dobson, Tarek Masoud, and Christopher Walker bring together leading analysts to explain how the world’s authoritarians are attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies—and what we can do about it. Far from offering a counsel of despair, the international contributors in this collection identify the considerable resources that democracy provides for blunting sharp power’s edge.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Christopher Walker is Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. In this capacity, he oversees the department responsible for NED’s multifaceted analytical work. He has a particular focus on authoritarian regimes and has been at the forefront of the discussion of how authoritarian powers exert influence on open systems, including in the context of sharp power. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of Democracy. Walker is co-editor (with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner) of Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with William J. Dobson and Tarek Masoud) of Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).

William J. Dobson is the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Prior to assuming this position, he was the Chief International Editor at NPR, where he led the network’s award-winning international coverage and oversaw a team of editors and correspondents in 17 overseas bureaus and Washington, DC. Dobson is the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, which examines the struggle between authoritarian regimes and the people who challenge them. It was selected as one of the “best books of 2012” by Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, The Telegraph, and Prospect, and it has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, German, Japanese, and Portuguese. Dobson has published widely on international relations, democracy, and authoritarianism. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Newsweek, and elsewhere. He has provided commentary and analysis on international politics for NPR, ABC, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Perry Conference Room in Encina Encina Hall may attend in person.