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.

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Peace settlements ending civil wars often pursue political solutions that require violent actors to transition to political parties and engage with politics peacefully. Some provide reserved seats, quotas, or guaranteed cabinet positions to safeguard these electoral transitions. What are the consequences of safeguards on rebel party grassroots? Scholarship on political affirmative action generally concludes that reservations are beneficial. However, safeguards may hinder the consolidation of rebel parties by generating counterproductive incentives, demobilizing the party base. I study the case of the former FARC-EP party Comunes, who were granted 10 legislative seats in the 2016 peace agreement. I implement a priming experiment with this crucial but difficult to reach population to assess the consequences of this provision. On average, primed participants reported less interest in a range of party-building activities. However, heterogeneity suggests these safeguards may come at the cost of civilian grassroots specifically, further concentrating rebel party activism among ex-combatants.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

María Ignacia Curiel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is an empirical scholar using experimental, observational, and qualitative data to study violent conflict and elections, peacebuilding, and representation.

Her recent work analyzes political parties with rebel origins and the conditions that shape their commitment to electoral competition. This work draws both from an in-depth empirical study of Comunes, a Colombian political party formed by the former FARC guerrilla, and from the study of broad patterns in rebel party behaviors across contexts. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Department of Politics at New York University.

She has previously conducted research for the United Nations University Center for Policy Research on excombatant reintegration into civilian life, the Inter-American Development Bank on the evolution of Venezuela’s energy infrastructure, and a Caracas-based organization on state-sponsored killings and police militarization. She was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and lived in New York from 2011-2023.

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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.

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Violent non-state actors frequently intervene in democratic politics, producing waves of political violence against voters, candidates, and elected officials. How do we understand these interventions? I argue that armed actors confront a tradeoff between two impulses: to discredit democracy as a political project or to bend elections and the policymaking process to their political agenda. How groups navigate that tradeoff is a function of how compatible their goals are with the democratic process and how much coercive power they can muster to compel voters and elected officials to meet their demands. I evaluate this theory through a paired comparison of two leftist insurgent groups: Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the FARC in Colombia. Archival evidence and computational content analysis illustrate the ideological divergence between the two groups. Leveraging variation in local military capacity caused by exogenous shifts in coca cultivation income, I demonstrate the effects of ideology and coercive capacity on violence and election outcomes. These results have implications for theories of political violence and democratic accountability.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Andres Uribe is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2023. His book project, "Coercion and Capture in Democratic Politics," examines how armed non-state groups seek to influence the democratic process. Through quantitative, computational, and archival analysis of rebel, paramilitary, and criminal groups in Latin America, he identifies the conditions that lead these actors to intervene in electoral politics, the structural forces that determine whether they succeed or fail, and the consequences of these interventions for democratic institutions and policy outcomes. Other projects explore processes of modern state-building, governance by non-state actors, and the political strategies of anti-democratic politicians.

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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.

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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.

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