Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Hoover scholar Larry Diamond calls for respect, collaboration, and a crackdown on young people’s smartphones.
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.
On a busy Thursday afternoon at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), I sat down with Professor Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, for a wide-ranging conversation on great power competition, U.S.–China relations, Cold War legacies, and the role of ideology in shaping global politics.
A former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and one of the most prominent voices on American foreign policy, Professor McFaul’s new book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder examines the stakes of the current geopolitical moment. Over the course of nearly an hour, we spoke about the elasticity of the term “great power competition,” the dangers of isolationism, the importance of middle powers, and the enduring influence of ideas in world politics. He also shared advice for young people interested in foreign policy, as well as the two books that shaped his early intellectual journey.
The original motivation for writing my book came in 2017 when the Trump administration came into power. They wrote a National Security Strategy that very explicitly stated that we were in a new era of great power competition. And that document, in my view, became one of the most famous national security strategies of recent decades because it was so clear about that shift. The Pentagon even came up with an acronym — GPC (great power competition) — and when they create an acronym, it usually means it’s here to stay.
Around that time, there was also a big debate about whether we had entered a new Cold War. It began first with Russia — books were being written about a “new Cold War” as early as 2009 — and then the conversation shifted to China. So my first motivation for writing the book was to ask: Is this actually true? Is the Cold War analogy useful or not? My answer is complicated. Some things are similar, some things are different. Some of what’s similar is dangerous; some isn’t. Some of what’s different makes things less dangerous, and some of what’s different is scarier than the Cold War. If we don’t get the diagnosis right, then we won’t have smart policies to sustain American national interests.
Because we “won” the Cold War, a lot of the mistakes made during it are forgotten. I use the analogy of when I used to coach third-grade basketball. If we won the game, nobody remembered the mistakes made in the first quarter. But if we lost, they remembered every single one. Because the U.S. “won,” people forget the mistakes.
There were major errors: McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and allying with autocratic regimes like apartheid South Africa when we didn’t have to. So, in the book, I dedicate one chapter to the mistakes we should avoid, one to the successes we should replicate, and one to the new issues the Cold War analogy doesn’t answer at all. It’s not about glorifying the past; it’s about learning from it in a clear-eyed way.
The short answer is no. I don’t believe in the concert model or in spheres of influence. That’s the 19th century, and this is the 21st. Trump’s team itself was internally confused on China. Trump personally thinks in terms of great powers carving up the world into spheres, but the national security strategy he signed was written by his advisors, not necessarily by him.
In thinking about Trump, I find it useful to remember that U.S. foreign policy debates don’t fall neatly between Democrats and Republicans. They run along three axes: isolationism versus internationalism, unilateralism versus multilateralism, and realism versus liberalism. Trump is radical on all three fronts — he’s an isolationist, he prefers unilateralism, and he doesn’t care about regime type. I think that combination is dangerous for America’s long-term interests.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exploring great power competition, Cold War lessons, and the future of U.S. foreign policy with FSI Director and former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul.
In the second annual “Reimagining Democracy” webinar series, professor Francis Fukuyama dove into the root causes of democracy’s current crisis. He discussed how declining trust, civic disengagement among youth, and other societal challenges have weakened democratic systems and what actions are needed to revive them.
Modern states depend upon bureaucracies effectively delivering services and enforcing regulations, from public health to environmental protection and postal services. When bureaucracies are plagued by inefficiency and incapacity and are unable to “deliver the goods,” elected representatives suffer. This can open the door for citizens to throw their support behind authoritarian leaders who promise to deliver more effectively.
A central question of bureaucratic design concerns the degree of autonomy that ‘principals’ — political actors like legislators — should delegate to bureaucratic ‘agents.’ Calibrating autonomy is crucial because principals cannot perfectly monitor or control agents, whose preferences often diverge from their own. On the one hand, highly autonomous bureaucrats may become unaccountable to their principals. Think of national security agencies that create secretive dissident watchlists or even authorize assassinations. On the other hand, bureaucracies with little autonomy will find their decision-making hamstrung by “red tape.” If public health agencies required extensive legislative approval for every aspect of vaccine delivery, infection rates would skyrocket. How, then, can bureaucracies be designed to achieve their goals, creatively respond to new problems, and minimize corruption, all while being perceived as legitimate?
In “Calibrating autonomy,” Katherine Bersch and Francis Fukuyama disaggregate the concept of autonomy into two facets (independence and discretion), present hypotheses concerning how each facet relates to capacity and quality, and then test these hypotheses, primarily using survey data from Brazilian bureaucrats. Their findings caution against overly blunt efforts to calibrate autonomy across multiple bureaucracies, suggesting instead that policymakers should understand a given agency’s capacity to perform.
The article builds on earlier research by co-author Francis Fukuyama, who in 2013 hypothesized a key moderating role for bureaucratic capacity in the relationship between autonomy and quality. Briefly, low-capacity agencies — lacking expertise and resources — will likely struggle to utilize their autonomy and deliver, whereas high-capacity bureaucracies will deliver effectively for opposite reasons. However, autonomy is itself a complex concept that ought to be disentangled before one can begin to spell out how it is linked to delivery.
Independence, the first “face” of autonomy, concerns the degree to which bureaucrats are constrained by actors who are close to politics, such as elected leaders or politically-appointed agency heads. More independent bureaucrats might allocate waste management contracts on the basis of cost-effectiveness or service quality records. Less independent bureaucrats might allocate according to the whims of politicians who wish to reward their allies. The degree of independence is oftentimes a function of the number and extent of political appointees in a given agency.
The second face of autonomy is discretion, or rather, the extent to which agencies are constrained by laws, rules, or protocols. Waste management agencies with limited discretion may struggle to respond to sporadic garbage pile-ups, whereas those with high discretion may set unpredictable collection schedules.
These two faces of autonomy lead to different expectations about how they are connected to quality. The authors hypothesize that independence and quality stand in a linear and positive relationship: agencies that are more unconstrained by political actors will deliver more effectively. By contrast, discretion and quality stand in a non-linear or “Goldilocks” relationship: too few and too many constraining rules will reduce quality. Following Fukuyama’s earlier research, capacity moderates these relationships; for example, less independence in specifically low-capacity agencies may strengthen quality, perhaps in cases where legislative actors are able to appoint highly qualified experts.
The authors select Brazil as their case, in part because it exhibits considerable internal variation in bureaucratic quality: some agencies are professional while others are incompetent. By focusing on one country, they avoid comparing fundamentally different national bureaucratic contexts. Further, selecting Brazil — with both strong and weak bureaucracies — reduces ‘selection biases,’ i.e., mistaking characteristics of only high- or low-quality agencies as causes of overall performance. From a global standpoint, Brazilian bureaucracies are solidly middle-ranged, neither outstanding nor abysmal.
The main empirical part of the paper involves a 2018 survey of over 3200 Brazilian federal bureaucrats. About 60% of the respondents are political appointees and 40% are civil servants, which enables looking at bureaucrats who stand in different relationships to political actors. The authors exclude military personnel, teachers, nurses, and local police officers.
As hypothesized, respondents’ perceptions of agency independence increase their perceptions of quality in a linear way. This finding likely reflects Brazil’s coalitional style of government: politicians benefit electorally from strong government performance; without bureaucratic independence, political pressure and influence from the many coalition partners would likely hinder bureaucrats and weaken performance. Meanwhile, perceptions of discretion align with the authors’ non-linear expectations.
Figure 3: (a) Impact of independence on quality at varying levels of capacity. (b) Impact of discretion on quality at varying levels of capacity.
These findings are mediated by capacity, which the authors measure in terms of resources, career length, salaries, and the proportion of agents in core or expert careers. The findings hold even when controlling for political factors like party membership or appointment type (political vs. civil servant), individual characteristics such as gender or years of service, and agency differences, including budget or size. These controls are based on administrative data from over 326,000 bureaucrats across Brazil’s 95 most important federal agencies.
Figure 4: Quality at varying levels of capacity.
“Calibrating autonomy” makes important conceptual and empirical contributions to our understanding of bureaucratic performance. By disaggregating the concept of autonomy into independence and discretion, it helps make sense of seemingly contradictory empirical findings, namely that both minimally and highly autonomous bureaucracies perform well. And by evaluating their hypotheses about the two faces of autonomy using Brazilian data, the authors guard against selection biases or problems from comparing countries with quite different bureaucratic landscapes.
The paper serves as a caution against overly simplistic or blunt “solutions” to poor bureaucratic performance. Merely limiting discretion or increasing legislative oversight can make matters worse if the relevant bureaucratic culture is not properly understood, especially when it comes to capacity.
*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
CDDRL Research-in-Brief [4-minute read]
The Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is now accepting applications for our summer 2026 program. The deadline to apply is 11:59 pm PST on Thursday, January 15, 2026.
The program brings together an annual cohort of approximately 30 mid-career practitioners from countries in political transition who are working to advance democratic practices and enact economic and legal reform to promote human development. Launched by CDDRL in 2005, the program was previously known as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program. The new name reflects an endowment gift from the Fisher family — Sakurako (Sako), ‘82, and William (Bill), MBA ‘84 — that secures the future of this important and impactful program.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, our program participants are selected from among hundreds of applicants every year for the significant contributions they have already made to their societies and their potential to make an even greater impact with some help from Stanford. We aim to give them the opportunity to join a global network of over 500 alumni from 97 countries who have all faced similar sets of challenges in bringing change to their countries.
The Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program provides an intensive 3-week on-campus forum for civil society leaders to exchange experiences and receive academic and policy training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work. Delivered by a leading Stanford faculty team composed of Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and more, the program allows emerging and established global leaders to explore new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote good governance, accountable politics, and find new ways to achieve economic development in their home countries.
Prospective fellows from Ukraine are also invited to apply for our Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development (SU-DD) Program, which runs concurrently with the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program. The SU-DD program provides a unique opportunity for mid-career practitioners working on well-defined projects aimed at strengthening Ukrainian democracy, enhancing human development, and promoting good governance. Applicants to the SU-DD program will use the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program application portal to apply and indicate their interest there. You will then be directed to a series of supplemental questions specific to the SU-DD program, including requiring a detailed description of your proposed project.
The program will run from Sunday, July 19, to Friday, August 7, 2026. Applications are due by 11:59 pm PST on Thursday, January 15, 2026.
Surina Naran is a Research Assistant at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, a junior currently political science with concentrations in Elections, Representation, and Governance and International Relations. She has worked both on the research side of politics, as well as in several government offices. Surina is interested in democratic structures, the strength of institutions, and democratic backsliding.
The Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University are pleased to host keynote lectures by:
The session will explore urgent questions at the heart of today’s global democratic challenges:
Open to the public. Especially geared toward those dedicated to strengthening democracy.
El Centro de Estudios Internacionales de El Colegio de México y el Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) de la Universidad de Stanford tienen el gusto de invitarlos a las conferencia magistrales a cargo de:
El evento abordará preguntas urgentes sobre los desafíos democráticos globales actuales:
Evento abierto al público. Especialmente dirigido a quienes se dedican a fortalecer la democracia.
Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus of Politics and (by courtesy) Economics at New York University. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor, and held visiting appointments in India, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. He is a member of the US National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his numerous awards, in 2010, he received the Johan Skytte Prize for "raising the scientific standards regarding the analysis of the relations between democracy, capitalism, and economic development." He has studied political regimes, democracy, autocracy, and their intermediate forms, as well as the conditions under which regimes survive and change, and their consequences for economic development and income equality. His focus is on the role of elections as a mechanism of managing societal conflicts. His current projects concern the phenomenon of "democratic backsliding" and the historical evolution of constitutional rules for electing chief executives.
Adam Przeworski es Profesor Emérito Carroll and Milton de Ciencia Política y (por cortesía) de Economía en la Universidad de Nueva York. Anteriormente, fue profesor en la Universidad de Chicago, donde ocupó la cátedra distinguida Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor, y tuvo nombramientos visitantes en India, Chile, Francia, Alemania, España y Suiza. Es miembro de la Academia Nacional de Artes y Ciencias de Estados Unidos. Entre sus numerosos premios, en 2010 recibió el Premio Johan Skytte por "elevar los estándares científicos en el análisis de las relaciones entre democracia, capitalismo y desarrollo económico." Ha estudiado los regímenes políticos, la democracia, la autocracia y sus formas intermedias, las condiciones bajo las cuales los regímenes sobreviven y cambian, así como sus consecuencias para el desarrollo económico y la igualdad de ingresos. Su enfoque se centra en el papel de las elecciones como mecanismo para gestionar los conflictos sociales. Sus proyectos actuales se refieren al fenómeno del "retroceso democrático" y la evolución histórica de las normas constitucionales para la elección de jefes de ejecutivo.
Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov) and co-directs the Democracy Action Lab. In 2023, she was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for her research on police violence and how it can be reduced, and in 2024, she received the Boris Mints Institute (BMI) Prize for her work on authoritarianism and its return as a global challenge. Her research focuses on the study of authoritarian regimes; violence, public security, and human rights; “non-state” forms of governance; distributive politics and the provision of public goods in Latin America.
Beatriz Magaloni es Profesora Graham Stuart de Relaciones Internacionales en el Departamento de Ciencia Política y Senior Fellow en el Freeman Spogli Institute, donde mantiene afiliaciones con el Centro sobre la Democracia, el Desarrollo y el Estado de Derecho (CDDRL) y el Centro para la Seguridad Internacional y la Cooperación (CISAC). Dirige el Laboratorio de Pobreza, Violencia y Gobernanza (PovGov) y co-dirige el Laboratorio de Acción en Democracia. En 2023 fue galardonada con el Premio de Estocolmo en Criminología por su investigación sobre la violencia policial y cómo puede reducirse, y en 2024 recibió el Premio del Instituto Boris Mints (BMI) por su trabajo sobre el autoritarismo y su retorno como desafío global. Su investigación se centra en el estudio de los regímenes autoritarios; la violencia, la seguridad pública y los derechos humanos; las formas de gobernanza "no estatales"; la política distributiva y la provisión de bienes públicos en América Latina.
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Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
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.”
CDDRL Mosbacher Director Kathryn Stoner noted that: “This award is a powerful testament to the incredible quality of Erin and Brett’s pathbreaking research. Their work significantly advances our understanding of how modern authoritarian regimes function in the 21st century, and I am so pleased that our CDDRL community helped to support some of their scholarship. But this honor is all theirs!”
The William H. Riker Book Award adds to the growing recognition of the Carters’ research: Propaganda in Autocracies has also received the Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award from the International Journal of Press/Politics, along with honorable mentions for both the APSA Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics and the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Best Book Award.
With this honor, Erin Baggott Carter and Brett Carter join the distinguished ranks of scholars whose work carries forward William Riker’s legacy of combining theory and empirics to deepen our understanding of political life.
The award recognizes their book, “Propaganda in Autocracies” (Cambridge University Press, 2023), as the best book in political economy published in the past three years.
On September 25, 2025, FSI Senior Fellow Claire Adida presented her team’s research at a CDDRL Research Seminar Series talk under the title, “Overcoming Barriers to Women’s Political Participation: Evidence from Nigeria.” The seminar addressed a central paradox in global politics: although women’s legal formal right to vote is nearly universal, deep gender gaps remain in informal forms of political participation, such as contacting a local government official or attending a community meeting. This lack of engagement means women’s voices are underrepresented in governance and policies are less likely to reflect their priorities. This is particularly salient in hybrid democracies, where informal political participation may matter more than casting a vote.
Adida situated the study in the context of Nigeria, a large and diverse democracy that remains heavily patriarchal. Surveys highlight these disparities starkly: nearly half of Nigerian men believe men make better leaders than women; two in five women report never discussing politics with friends or family; and women are consistently less likely than men to attend meetings or contact community leaders. Against this backdrop, the project tested interventions designed to reduce barriers that discourage women’s participation.
The research team identified three categories of constraints: resource-based (a lack of time, skills, or information), norms-based (social expectations that women should remain outside the public sphere), and psychological (feelings of disempowerment and doubt about one’s capacity to create change). The study focused on the last two. To explore these, the team partnered with ActionAid Nigeria to conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) across 450 rural wards in three southwestern states. Local leaders identified groups of economically active women, aged 21 to 50, who were permitted by their spouses to join.
All communities began with an informational session on local governance. Beyond that, two types of training were introduced. The first, targeted at women, consisted of five sessions over five months designed to build leadership, organizing, and advocacy skills. These emphasized group-based learning and aimed to foster collective efficacy — the belief that a group can act together to achieve change. The second, targeted at men, encouraged husbands to act as allies in supporting women’s participation. After the initial informational session, communities were randomly assigned to no longer receive further training, to receive the 5 sessions of women’s training, or to receive the 5 sessions of women’s training and the 5 sessions of men’s training.
The findings were striking. Women’s trainings had clear positive effects: participants were more likely to engage in politics, attend meetings, and contact local leaders. The quality of their participation also improved, suggesting greater confidence and effectiveness. There was also evidence that these women’s trainings activated collective and self-efficacy, lending credence to the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA), a framework explaining how a sense of shared identity, group-based injustice, and group efficacy build political engagement. By contrast, men’s trainings produced modest results. They did not increase women’s participation beyond the women’s trainings and, in some cases, had small negative effects, such as on grant applications. Still, men’s trainings reduced opposition to women’s involvement, improved beliefs about women in leadership, and increased perceptions of more permissive community norms, even if they did not translate into an increase in women’s political participation.
Adida noted that these limited effects may reflect “ceiling effects” — many men in the sample were already relatively supportive compared to national averages, or lower attendance rates. It is also possible that changes in men’s attitudes take longer to manifest in behavior. The seminar concluded that advocacy trainings for women show strong promise in boosting participation, while efforts to reshape patriarchal norms among men may require longer-term strategies.
In Nigeria, women are far less likely than men to attend meetings or contact leaders. Claire Adida’s research reveals interventions that make a difference.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) continue to deepen their decades-long authoritarian control over Turkish politics, economy, and society. Indeed, repressive tactics once reserved for Turkey’s marginalized Kurdish community have increasingly been applied to AKP’s opponents more generally, including journalists, business elites, and mayors. Key among these opponents is Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, viewed as the face of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). İmamoğlu, seen as the frontrunner to challenge Erdoğan’s presidency in 2028, was arrested in March 2025 on spurious charges of terrorism and corruption.
At the same time, Turkey’s opposition is finding ways to resist Erdoğan’s autocratization. CHP — which traces its roots to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his vision for a secular Turkish nation — learned from its disappointing loss in Turkey’s 2023 national elections. By transforming its electoral strategy for the 2024 local elections, the CHP not only bested AKP’s vote share but also won in many areas that are historically AKP strongholds, which are often populated by conservative voters. What explains the CHP’s significant local turnaround under the constraints of Turkey’s ‘electoral authoritarian’ regime?
In “Turkey's Hard Road to Democratic Renewal,” Ayça Alemdaroğlu, Toygar Sinan Baykan, Ladin Bayurgil, and Aytuğ Şaşmaz caution against the received wisdom that broad, national-level coalitions offer the best hope of undermining authoritarian power. Such coalitions are difficult to sustain in countries like Turkey or Hungary, where authoritarian leaders control major political institutions and the public purse while muzzling their opponents and the media. Instead, the authors point to the surprising benefits of building alternatives to authoritarianism at the local level.
At first glance, the control of local governments in authoritarian political systems does not seem especially advantageous in terms of autonomy and influence. However, Turkish mayors control many of the policy domains that directly affect ordinary citizens, including transportation, sanitation, and housing. When local services and infrastructure are poor, voters may be willing to switch their partisan allegiance, even in places where the incumbent party works to distribute patronage and to propagandize them. Local governance enables opposition politicians to gain visibility and public support, as well as to demonstrate their administrative competence.
How exactly did the CHP pull off its impressive local showing in 2024? As noted above, the opposition built a national-level coalition in 2023, fractured by ideological divisions and disputes over its presidential candidate against Erdoğan, ultimately collapsing after the election. It was no match for Erdoğan’s unified messaging around threats to Turkey’s national security — portraying Kurds at home and in Syria as threats — and on nationalist pride in Turkey’s indigenous defense industry.
In 2024, by contrast, the CHP’s campaign strategy emerged from the bottom up: it employed electoral strategists and pollsters across Turkish municipalities, conducted fieldwork in competitive areas, selected mayoral candidates who could win, created local coalitions across ideological lines, and fine-tuned its messaging around service provision. Its flexible and pragmatic strategy appealed to both Turkey’s Sunni majority as well as its minority Alevis and Kurds. Meanwhile, the AKP was highly centralized in its reliance on Erdoğan’s popularity, failing to adapt to the demands of local residents whose support it believed was guaranteed.
To understand how the CHP won and how it consolidated its electoral gains, the authors conducted interviews with newly elected mayors and vice mayors, CHP party officials, activists, journalists, and political observers. Interviewees were selected from six municipal districts where no opposition-controlled mayor had won an election for at least two decades and where the CHP improved its vote share by five or more points between 2019 and 2024. In these traditional AKP strongholds, voters complained a great deal about the high cost of living in Erdoğan’s Turkey. At the same time, they were becoming less religiously conservative and less supportive of a “majoritarian” style of politics.
Table 1: Six Turkish districts in brief
During the campaign, the CHP worked to reverse its image as a party committed to Atatürk’s “aggressive” secularism, sometimes nominating conservative Sunni candidates in otherwise divided districts. It focused not on ideology but on service delivery and other issues that appealed across ethnic and sectarian lines. Incumbent CHP mayors advised prospective mayors, creating intra-party relationships that were complemented by the work of CHP grassroots organizations.
The authors introduce a number of the CHP’s successful mayoral candidates. Some of them were well-known national-level politicians who realized the benefits they could accrue by leaving Turkey’s toothless parliament and applying their skills to local government. Multiple mayors were of Kurdish and/or Alevi background, but they used these identities to appeal both inside and outside of their in-groups, for example, by attending Friday prayers with their Sunni constituents. One Alevi candidate gave municipal assembly list spots to conservative Sunnis and Kurds. By contrast, the AKP’s mayoral candidates — mainly nominated on the basis of their loyalty to Erdoğan — were perceived by their constituents as corrupt, aloof, and inefficient.
Erdoğan’s opponents will likely struggle to reap the benefits of local governance, let alone to mount an effective challenge to AKP rule at the national level. These challenges will be heightened by AKP’s efforts to repress and arrest those whom it finds threatening. What’s more, CHP constituents expect not only the delivery of effective public services, but also patronage, especially public sector jobs, in exchange for their continued support. The AKP recognizes the challenge posed by its mayoral opponents and has responded by slashing municipal budgets. But the CHP is becoming more unified in the face of these common hardships posed by the AKP.
Ultimately, the growth of local-level CHP power opens up possibilities for democratic alternatives to AKP. The authors offer a novel perspective on how pragmatic local election campaigns, centered on service delivery, can serve as a means of undermining the influence of authoritarian leaders.
*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
CDDRL Research-in-Brief [4-minute read]
