Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world.

In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond.

Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators—and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad, as well as from masters of high-tech repression like Xi Jinping.

Offering incisive portraits of today’s authoritarian leaders, Spin Dictators explains some of the great political puzzles of our time—from how dictators can survive in an age of growing modernity to the disturbing convergence and mutual sympathy between dictators and populists like Donald Trump.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2021-2). 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 lead editor of The American Political Science Review, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford) and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), as well as receiving fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Smith Richardson Foundation. His book, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (The Free Press 2011) was one of the Financial Times’ “Best Political Books of 2011”. He is the editor of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (Brookings Institution Press 2018), and co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press 2022).

 

At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.

When backsliding occurs at the hands of populist presidents who were elected in landslide elections, producing dominant executives with few institutional checks and weak opposition parties, should we blame the decline in democracy on their populist ideology, their presidential powers, or their parties’ dominance in the legislature? The literature on democratic backsliding has mostly arrived at a consensus on what backsliding entails and collectively has revealed its growing prevalence around the globe. Yet, scholars have not settled on causal explanations for this phenomenon. We assess the evidence for recent ideology-centered arguments for democratic backsliding relative to previous institutional arguments among all democratically elected executives serving in all regions of the world since 1970. We use newly available datasets on populist leaders and parties to evaluate the danger of populists in government, and we employ matching methods to distinguish the effects of populist executives, popularly-elected presidents, and dominant executives on the extent of decline in liberal democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Marisa Kellam is associate professor of political science at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan). Her research focuses on the quality of democracy in Latin America. In her work, she links institutional analysis to governance outcomes within three lines of inquiry: (1) political parties and coalitional politics, (2) media freedom and democratic accountability, and (3) populism and democratic backsliding. She has published her research in peer-reviewed journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, and Political Communication. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, she spent several years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Since 2013, Marisa Kellam has been teaching international and Japanese students in the English-based degree programs of Waseda University’s School of Political Science & Economics.

At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.

Studies of group-based conflict typically focus on the group as the unit of analysis. But group attributes often mask individual-level variation. Why do some individuals within groups identify more strongly with the group, feel greater hostility toward out-groups, and participate in conflict more than others?

We argue that a key ingredient in explaining who within a group feels more aggrieved, more attached, and more hostile to others is the legacy of violence. Violence itself creates and amplifies group identities that then persist across generations within families. It also forges a sense of victimhood, an identity that implies moral status and out-group threat. We test this argument using multigenerational surveys we fielded in Guatemala and Cambodia in 2017 and 2018.

We find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to more violence during prior periods of conflict identify more strongly with their group, identify as victims, and distrust the rival out-group. We find that the effect of these identities on political participation depends on the political context, both during and after the conflict, and how it shapes blame attribution and the meaning of political participation.

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

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Noam Lupu is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University. He studies comparative political behavior, partisanship and political parties, class and inequality, representation, and legacies of violence. He is the author of Party Brands in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Virginia Oliveros and Luis Schiumerini) of Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL and the Center for Latin American Studies.

This talk by Mukulika Banerjee will present an anthropological study of democracy in India. It will draw on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages in India over a period of 15 years, both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy, and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment, and hope—values that are essential for democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mukulika Banerjee was inaugural Director of the LSE South Asia Centre from 2015-2020 and is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She studied in Delhi and Oxford universities and taught at Oxford and UCL before joining LSE. Her books include Why India Votes? (2014), The Pathan Unarmed (2001) and The Sari (2003). She is also the editor of Muslim Portraits (2007). Her monograph Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India was published by OUP (New York) in 2021.

At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.

Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is “the great experiment” of our time.

Why is it so hard to build diverse democracies? Would principles and policies do we need to adopt to maximize the chances of making them work? And how good are the chances of success? The project of building thriving diverse democracies may well fail. But the chances of success, this talk argues, are better than the pessimism which is now dominant suggests.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Yascha Mounk is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Founder of Persuasion. The host of The Good Fight podcast, his latest book is The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.

 

 

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

About the Seminar: Joseph Needham famously asked why China did not have its own Industrial Revolution. Using a newly constructed database, Yasheng Huang will show that China’s technological collapse happened much earlier than previously thought and the collapse coincided closely with the rise of autocracy and ideological homogeneity.
 

Register Now

About the Speaker:

Yasheng Huang is Epoch Foundation professor of international management, professor of global economics and management, and faculty director of action learning at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently involved in research projects in three broad areas: 1) political economy of contemporary China, 2) historical technological and political developments in China, and 3) as a co-PI in “Food Safety in China: A Systematic Risk Management Approach” (supported by Walmart Foundation, 2016-). He has published numerous articles in academic journals and in media and 11 books in English and Chinese. His book, The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today, will be published by Yale University Press in 2023.

 

About the Seminar: In this time of great challenges, our democracies urgently need to produce citizens who can move from demanding change to making it. But the skills for doing so are not innate, they are learned. In this talk, Beth Simone Noveck will discuss how both citizens and governments can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Drawing on the latest methods from data and social sciences, including original survey data from around the world, she proposes a practical set of methods for public servants, community leaders, students, activists, and anyone who wants to be a catalyst for positive social change.

 

Register Now

 

About the Speaker: Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Family Center for Global Impact and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. The author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021) (named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review), she is also Core Faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI (IEAI) at Northeastern. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

In addition to Solving Public Problems, Beth is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard Univ Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005).

About the Seminar: For centuries, the world’s dominant power has been the state that wielded the world’s dominant navy. More recently, globalization has been remade, as a sea-based trade—85% of all global trade moves by sea. As does nearly 2/3rds of the world trade in oil and gas, while 93% of all data in the world moves along undersea cables that line the ocean floor. The oceans are vital, too, to our changing climate. All of which highlights the drama of China’s return to the high seas, and its rapid maritime and naval build-up. The net result: a new arms race, centered in the Western Pacific but reaching out into the Arctic and the Indian Oceans, and pulling in Russia, India, Japan and Europe.  Bruce Jones, author of To Rule the Waves, will explore how our security, our prosperity, and our environment are being reshaped by the dynamics of sea power.

Register Now

About the Speaker: 

Bruce Jones is a senior fellow and director of the project on international order and strategy at the Brookings Institution. The author or co-author of several books on international order, his most recent work is “To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the Seminar: Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson's book project, Wars and Freedoms, makes the case that, throughout human history, external wars are common catalysts for political change at home, and they do so in large part because of their impact on the organizational capacity of the disenfranchised. It draws widely from across the social sciences and humanities: literature; history; biography; psychology; sociology; economics; and political science. The book draws upon these diverse ways of knowing to provide evidence from across time and around the world of the relevance of a simple framework for understanding which types of external wars are conducive to the emergence of broad-based freedoms, the building of states, and the shrinking of wealth inequalities on one hand, and when instead, others have led to the building of military castes, or an increased propensity for political polarization,  ethnic conflict, attempted coups, revolution and genocide on the other. In so doing, Wars and Freedoms provides a re-interpretation of the history of revolutions and political change, in order to make clear which lessons and episodes from history may be more germane for the future of democracy and freedoms in the twenty-first century.

Wars and Freedoms describes how there were historically three paths that connected organizational skills developed in external wars to the spread of democracy and democratic values: in the shadow of a crisis that threatened broad class conflict, through a more gradual process of state-building in response to ongoing external existential threats, and through the organizational efforts of committed military leaders. Of these, however, only the last, the most fragile and contingent, is still likely to emerge organically. Understanding the decline of other paths, however, can still help us understand both how political freedoms and democracy emerged, how our democracies may die, and what we may still be able to do about it.

Register Now

About the Speaker:

Saumitra Jha is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in Stanford's Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. His work on the historical relationship between conflict and markets has been received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best article in political economy from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in the top journals in both Economics and Political Science, including The American Political Science Review, Econometrica, and The Quarterly Journal of Economics. His co-authored work on Heroes was awarded the Oliver Williamson Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Also an award-winning teacher, he has shown a particular interest in communicating the results of his research to broader audiences, in the press (such as the Indian Express and USA Today) and through online policy and social media outlets (VoxEU, VoxDev, Public Books, Broadstreet, Ideas for India, AOC), and to a range of student and practitioner audiences, including cadets at West Point, members of the US intelligence community, European Union diplomats, and entrepreneurs in Africa, India and the United States.  His work has been featured in the Economist, Financial Times and the Washington Post, among others, and he has provided commentary for television and radio news, including for the BBC, ABC and CBC.