The longer these authoritarian parties are in power, the more they eviscerate democratic institutions. But they are not invincible or irreversible. Incipient authoritarianism has been turned back in countries as diverse as Brazil, Poland, Sri Lanka, and Senegal. The slide away from liberal democracy has been reversed recently in Botswana and Mauritius. An executive coup against democracy was defeated in South Korea. Young people in Bangladesh overthrew a dictator last year in a remarkable upsurge of protest. And the longstanding autocracies in Venezuela and Turkey are looking increasingly desperate and unpopular. These examples bear lessons we must learn and promote if we are to ignite — as we surely can — a new era of democratic progress.

First, we must study what it takes to defeat autocrats at the ballot box. Typically, electoral battles are not a straight contrast between democracy and autocracy. Voters weigh their circumstances of life as well. Fortunately, autocrats have other failings besides their corruption, lawlessness, and abuse of power: sooner or later, they fail to deliver on their material promises. Successful democratic campaigns target the populists’ hypocrisy and address not just people’s political rights but their economic and social needs. 

To defeat autocrats, democratic forces must offer specific, credible plans to meet the core policy challenges of economic growth and distribution, fairness and inclusion, education, health care, infrastructure, public safety, and national security. 

But people everywhere also need a vision of what constitutes a good and just form of government. Here, democracies have dropped the ball in making the case FOR democracy as the best form of government. Decades ago, as they fought dictatorships and then came to power, democracies taught their young people the values, ideas, and history of democracy. But as new democracies stabilized, the existence of a democratic culture came to be assumed, and countries forgot the terrible price they paid under dictatorship — the fear, falsehoods, powerlessness, and repression, the lack of accountability, voice, justice, and human dignity. We can make the practical case for democracy — it performs better over time. But we cannot pin the argument on performance, which may fail at specific points in time.
 

Ultimately, the case for democracy is that being able to speak truth to power, to hold it accountable, and to change those who exercise it is a core element of human dignity and a basic human right. The freedoms to speak, publish, pray, organize, and assemble are inalienable human rights. As are the rights to a fair and impartial trial and to have all citizens be treated equally under the law. It is only democracy — never autocracy — that protects these rights and treats citizens with dignity by investing sovereignty in them, not some self-appointed minority. Liberty and democracy are intertwined.

We must make these points relentlessly, creatively, and convincingly, not just in the schools, at successively higher levels of instruction and deliberation, but through the social media platforms where people live their information lives. Russia, China, Iran, and other autocracies wage extensive propaganda campaigns to trash liberal values and institutions. They portray democracy as lacking in dynamism, capacity, and masculine strength. These arguments are false, offensive, and degrading to the human spirit. But they will not fail of their own accord. They need to be defeated by better, more inspiring arguments and narratives about why people need freedom to thrive, and why societies need democracy to have freedom.

Today, there are four arenas of struggle for the future of freedom, and democrats must prevail in all of them. The core battle is now in the countries that have been sliding back from democracy to autocracy. 

In almost every instance where authoritarian projects have been defeated, it has been through elections. Illiberal populists crave the legitimacy that comes from victory in multiparty elections. But corruption and misrule erode their electoral support. So, they need elections that are competitive enough to validate their claim to rule but rigged enough to minimize the risk of defeat. The pathway to restoring democracy is to seize the electoral opportunity, flood the zone with election workers and observers, and wage an effective campaign so that people who have grown weary of authoritarian abuse can defeat it at the ballot box.

To win, democrats must forge a unified coalition across factional and ideological divides. They must offer concrete policy ideas to improve people’s lives. They need a narrative about what has happened to justice and democracy, and why restoring these will help to make the country great again. A campaign is not a legal brief. It must inspire and excite. It requires strong, compelling leadership. It must engage diverse sections of society, including people who once supported the authoritarian populists but are now disillusioned. Democrats must also express patriotism and show that illiberal populists wave a false flag. Democrats are the truer patriots because they recognize democracy and liberty as pillars of national greatness.

These lessons can help to restore democracy where it has been lost and to secure it in a second arena, when it is under challenge from authoritarian populist parties. But there are two other arenas of struggle in which we must prevail. Globally, democrats cannot let the world’s powerful authoritarian states capture and hollow out the global institutions to defend freedom — the UN Human Rights Council, the international and regional instruments of electoral observation and assistance, and the rules that govern the flows of data and information. Neither can we shrink from the global battle to support democratic values and free flows of information, and to lend technical and financial support to peoples, parties, media, and movements around the world struggling for freedom. 

In the face of isolationist efforts to defund and withdraw from this cause, we must convince democratic publics that we can only secure our own freedom by supporting that of others. A more democratic world will be a safer, fairer, less corrupt, more peaceful, and prosperous world.
 

All of that has been under existential challenge in Ukraine since Russia’s brutal invasion in February of 2022. Resisting aggression is the fourth arena of struggle. There is no more urgent priority than to give the Ukrainian people the weapons, resources, and economic sanctions to defeat Russian aggression. Similarly, we must ensure that Taiwan’s democracy does not suffer the same aggression from the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan must have the weapons, trade, and international dignity it needs to survive. We must preserve the status quo across the strait by making clear that the US and other democracies stand behind the resolve of a free people to chart their own destiny in Taiwan — as we do in Ukraine.

We meet here today just a short distance from the grotesque wall that stood for decades as the dividing line between freedom and tyranny. 36 years ago — almost to this day — the wall was torn down. Few imagined it would happen when it did. But it did because of democratic conviction and resolve. Now, we are in a new cold war with global authoritarianism. The history of Berlin should constantly remind us that freedom is fragile, but it can also be resilient. We must never lose faith in the rightness of our cause and the obligation we bear once again to defend freedom in an hour of peril.

Professor Diamond delivered this speech at the Berlin Freedom Conference on November 10, 2025.

Motivation & Overview:

Black Americans have long and overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party, though Donald Trump modestly increased his share of the Black vote in 2024 (15%, up from 8% in 2020). Given this enduring partisan loyalty — and the fact that Democrats generally take more liberal policy positions than Republicans — we might expect a strong overlap between Black Americans’ partisanship and their ideological self-identification. Yet, according to national surveys, up to 50 percent of Black Americans describe themselves as conservative, a pattern many social scientists have treated as paradoxical. 

In “The curious case of Black ‘conservatives’,” Hakeem Jefferson shows that the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are unfamiliar to many Black Americans. Constructing a “Liberal-Conservative Familiarity Scale,” Jefferson finds that Black Americans who are familiar with these ideological labels overwhelmingly identify as liberal Democrats. As such, the canonical liberal-conservative measure — used not only in the American National Election Studies (ANES) but also throughout the social sciences — may be ill-suited to understanding Black political behavior. Jefferson calls on researchers to describe ideological concepts more carefully to respondents and to develop new measures that better capture Black Americans’ political worldviews. 

Prior Research & Jefferson’s Intervention:

Political scientists and other researchers and practitioners have long accepted that the “mismatch” between Black voting behavior (or partisanship) and ideology is real. Some explain this by pointing to the strength of Black racial identity or consciousness: Black conservatives, they argue, are indeed conservative but support Democrats because of a shared commitment to racial progress. Others suggest that Black conservatives who might otherwise support Republicans refrain from doing so because of social costs within their communities. And indeed, experimental research has shown that Black participants are less likely to donate to Republican campaigns if they believe that members of their community will learn of such contributions. Still others emphasize that many Black Americans hold conservative views on social or moral issues, such that their identification as conservative on surveys may reflect those views, which do not necessarily inform their Democratic partisanship and thus help explain the partisanship-ideology mismatch. 

Jefferson acknowledges that there are indeed Black conservatives and that Black Americans who wish to ‘defect’ to the Republican Party may fear the social consequences of doing so. However, he argues that these explanations fall short of accounting for the long-standing mismatch between partisanship and ideology among Black Americans, and that the prevalence of Black conservative Democrats has been dramatically overstated. His argument begins with a striking observation: in 2012, 30 percent rated Barack Obama as conservative and 9 percent said they did not know where to place him ideologically. Conversely, 29 percent rated Mitt Romney as liberal, while 12 percent said they did not know. These patterns suggest that many Black respondents may have less familiarity with ideological concepts than is often assumed. Political scientists, dating back to the 1960s, have cautioned that few Americans, across racial groups, think about politics in abstract ideological terms. That the liberal-conservative measure remains so central to research on public opinion suggests that these early warnings have largely gone unheeded. 

Data & Methods:

Jefferson begins by examining the relationship between partisanship and ideological self-identification over time and across racial groups. From 1972 to 2016, the average correlation between these two measures was .44 for White Americans, compared to just .12 for Black Americans. In 2016, the correlations were .73 and .001, respectively! In other words, among Black Americans, partisanship and ideology were almost wholly unrelated.. 

As shown below, the correlation between partisanship and ideology among White Americans has increased sharply over the past five decades, reflecting the broader ideological sorting of the major parties since the 1960s. By contrast, among Black Americans, the relationship has remained weak and, if anything, has slightly declined over time.
 

Image

Figure 1. Correlation between ideology and partisanship over time, by race, ANES 1972–2016. Figure 1 displays the correlation coefficient (r) between ideology and partisanship in the ANES over time. The red open dots indicate the r for Black Americans. The black closed dots indicate that for whites. LOESS lines are overlaid in black for white Americans and dashed red for Black Americans.
 

In addition, Jefferson notes that in 2012, 41 percent of Black respondents who were asked to identify their political ideology answered “don’t know,” while 18 percent placed themselves at the midpoint. In total, roughly 60 percent of Black respondents declined to take a clear ideological position. By contrast, only 19 percent of White respondents said “don’t know,” and 24 percent identified as moderate.

To further explore these patterns, Jefferson constructs a five-item Liberal-Conservative (L-C) Familiarity Scale based on whether respondents correctly identified Democrats and Democratic presidential nominees as liberal, Republicans and Republican nominees as conservative, and the Republican Party as the more conservative political party. Respondents who answered all items correctly, demonstrating perfect ideological familiarity. Jefferson finds that the scale exhibits high internal consistency.

The L-C Familiarity Scale serves as Jefferson’s key independent variable, which he theorizes influences how strongly people’s ideological self-placement aligns with their partisan identification. Consistent with this expectation, Black respondents with greater ideological familiarity are more likely to exhibit coherent alignments between ideology and partisanship. As the figure below shows, among Black respondents, higher liberal-conservative familiarity is associated with a lower likelihood of identifying as conservative. In other words, Black respondents who more accurately recognize which parties and candidates are liberal or conservative tend to place themselves further to the left on the ideological scale, where we would expect them to be, given their longstanding support for the Democratic Party. Conversely, Black respondents who identify as conservative and who have a clearer grasp of ideological terms are more likely to identify as Republicans, suggesting that ideological familiarity helps resolve the apparent paradox that has long puzzled political scientists and other researchers.
 

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Figure 3. Liberal-conservative familiarity scores predict ideological identification for Black Americans (top plot), but not white Americans (bottom plot). X-axis presents liberal-conservative familiarity score and the corresponding 95th percent confidence interval. Y-axis indicates the model for predicting ideology (conservative), faceted by race. Model 1 includes controls for age, income, education, gender, economic policy attitudes, social policy attitudes, religiosity, and moral traditionalism. Model 2 includes all of model 1’s variables and feeling thermometers toward Black Americans, white Americans, big business, unions, Hispanics, middle class, and gays and lesbians. Model 3 includes all of model 2’s variables and four averaged questions for office recognition. Model 4 includes all of model 2’s variables and three averaged questions for office recognition. Model 1 includes years 1992, 1994, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016; Model 2 includes 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016; Model 3 includes 2012; Model 4 includes 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. Models 1, 2, and 4 include year-fixed effects. Standard errors are robust SE (HC1) and clustered by year when applicable.
 

White respondents demonstrate much greater familiarity with ideological concepts, yet this familiarity does not predict their ideological self-identification, as it does for Black respondents. Instead, White ideological self-placement is more closely tied to public policy and symbolic issues, such as government involvement in the economy or attitudes toward demographic change.

These results hold even after Jefferson controls for social conservatism (e.g., religiosity), which some have argued helps explain the partisanship-ideology mismatch among Black Americans. They also persist when he controls for the interviewer’s race, addressing the alternative explanation that Black respondents may understate their Republican partisanship to avoid social sanction within their communities.

Findings & Mechanisms:

Jefferson concludes by offering several possibilities for why Black Americans exhibit lower levels of liberal-conservative familiarity. One possibility is that Black and White Americans inhabit different “racialized informational environments.” Political discourse in Black communities may focus more on concrete issues such as racial inequality and systemic injustice, while discourse in White communities may more often invoke ideological labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” Another explanation builds on the idea that the Democratic Party — with which most Black Americans identify — is itself less oriented around ideology and more around social groups and issue bundles, whereas the Republican Party is more explicitly ideological. This may lead to less exposure to ideological terms among Black Americans.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

The "Meet Our Researchers" series showcases the incredible scholars at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Through engaging interviews conducted by our undergraduate research assistants, we explore the journeys, passions, and insights of CDDRL’s faculty and researchers.

What role do middle or “auxiliary” powers — like India, Brazil, or Turkey — play in this evolving landscape of great power competition?

This is one of the biggest differences between today and the Cold War. Back then, the system was much more binary. Today, the world is more fragmented. I think of it as a race: the U.S. is ahead, China is closing the gap, and everyone else is running behind. But they’re running. They have agency. They’re not just sitting on the sidelines.

Countries like India, South Africa, Turkey, and Brazil are swing states. They’re not going to line up neatly with Washington or Beijing. BRICS is a perfect example — democracies and autocracies working in the same grouping. The U.S. has to get used to living with that uncertainty. We need to engage, not withdraw.

And at the same time, while the U.S. seems to be retreating from some of its instruments of influence, China appears to be expanding. What worries you about this divergence?

It’s striking. We’re cutting back on USAID, pulling out of multilateral institutions, shutting down things like Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, and cutting back on diplomats. Meanwhile, the Chinese are expanding their presence, their multilateral influence, their media footprint, and their diplomacy.

If the autocrats are organized, the democrats have to be organized too. We can’t just step back and assume things will turn out fine. That’s not how competition works.
 

During the Cold War, despite intense rivalry, the U.S. and USSR cooperated on nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. How do you see cooperation taking shape in today’s U.S.–China rivalry?

That’s a really important point. Cooperation in the Cold War wasn’t just about deterring the Soviets — it was also about working with them when we had overlapping interests. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 was a monumental achievement. It was signed at the height of the Vietnam War, while we were literally fighting proxy conflicts, and yet we found common ground on nuclear weapons.

I think something similar can and should happen now. Even if we’re competing with China, and even with Russia, there are areas where cooperation is in everyone’s interest: nuclear arms control, nonproliferation of dangerous technologies like AI and bioweapons, and climate change. These are existential issues. We cooperated with our adversaries in the past; we should be able to do it again.

One of the big debates in international relations is about the role of ideology. How much does ideology matter in this current geopolitical context?

It matters a lot. My book isn’t called Great Powers — it’s called Autocrats vs. Democrats for a reason. I believe ideas and regime type shape international politics.

Putinism and Xi Jinping Thought are exported differently. Putinism — illiberal nationalism — has ideological allies in Europe and here in the U.S. Xi’s model is more economically attractive to parts of the Global South. Power matters, of course, but it’s not the only thing.

You can see this clearly if you compare Obama and Trump. There was no big structural power shift between 2016 and 2017, but their worldviews were radically different. That’s evidence that ideas and individuals matter a great deal in shaping foreign policy.
 

You’ve warned about the dangers of U.S. retrenchment. Are there historical moments that you see as parallels to today?

I worry about a repeat of the 1930s. When Italy invaded Ethiopia, Americans said, “Where’s Ethiopia?” When Japan invaded China, they said, “Why do we care?” Then came 1939. Stalin and Hitler invaded Poland, and we still said, “That’s not our problem.” Eventually, it became our problem.

If we disengage now, we may find ourselves facing similar consequences. That’s part of why I wrote this book — to push back against the idea that retrenchment is safe. It’s not.

To close, what advice would you give to students who want to build careers like yours? And, could you recommend a book or two for young people entering this field?

Be more intentional than I was. Focus on what you want to do, not just what you want to be. Develop your ideas first, then go into government or academia to act on them. Don’t go into public service just for a title. I saw too many people in government who were there just to “be” something, without a clear agenda. The “to do” should come first; the “to be” comes later.

As for books, my own book, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, is coming out soon — you can pre-order it. But the two books that shaped me the most when I was young are Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution and Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter’s Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.