- Hello everybody, my
name is Alexandra Vacroux, I'm the Executive Director
of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian
Studies at Harvard University. And I am thrilled today to join you, to have you to join us at a book talk with Sergei Guriev and Dan Treisman. Their new book is "Spin Dictators" and it focuses on a question that many of us has been
thinking about for a while, which is why do affluent
societies accept dictators when they really should know better? This is my re-characterization
of the main question. They have a number of answers, I'm not going to give a spoiler and I'm gonna allow Dan Treisman to give a presentation on the book and then Sergei will field the questions but first let me introduce my guests. Dan Treisman is a Professor
of Political Science at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has a BA from Oxford University and a PhD in government from Harvard. His work focuses on Russian
politics and economics as well as comparative political economy and he's published four
books in many articles in leading political science
and economic journals as well as in the public affairs journals, foreign affairs and foreign policy. His book, "The Return",
which I have right here, "Russia's Journey From
Gorbachev to Medvedev" was one of the financial times
best political books of 2011 and one of my favorites. Sergei Guriev is the Scientific Director of the Master and PhD
programmes in economics at Sciences Po, he also has the book. He's a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association. From 2016-2019, he was the Chief Economist at the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development. His research interests
include contract theory, corporate governance, political economics and labor mobility. He's published in international
refereed journals, including, "American Economic Review, "Journal of European
Economic Association", "The Journal of Economic Perspectives" and "The American
Political Science Review". From 1999-2013, Sergei was on the faculty of the New Economic School in Moscow and from 2004, until he was
forced to leave Russia in 2013, he was also the Rector of
the New Economic School. He has a habilitation degree in Economics and a PhD in Applied Math from the Russian Academy of Science, in addition to a Master's of Science from the Moscow Institute
of Physics and Technology. I'm gonna turn it over Dan, with a presentation and
an overview of the book and then we'll do questions. Dan, over to you. - Thanks, thanks Alexandra, it's great to be here,
thanks for the invitation. Let me just try and get
set up with the screen. Okay, so thanks everybody for coming. What I'm gonna talk about
is, as Alexandra said, our new book, "Spin Dictators", and as she said, its
joint work between myself and Sergei Guriev of Sciences Po. We started this line
of work some years ago from the observation that
well, when you look around at leaders in authoritarian
countries these days, they look a bit different from most people's conception of what a dictatorship should look like. So if we think about the classic
20th century dictatorships, dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Romao, these were extremely
violent repressive systems, which very often came
with an official ideology. People were all obliged to accept and show loyalty to sometimes
quite exotic ideology, even the dictatorships in the 20th century that were not so ideological, regimes such as that
of Pinochet and Chile, under the Quinta of generals and Videla in Argentina
or Idi Amin in Uganda, these were extremely violent, even though less ideological with thousands of people
killed under their rule. But if we look at the range of leaders in non-democratic countries
in the last few decades, these guys look a little different. First of all, they often wear
conservative business suits rather than military uniforms, here, we see Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Alberto Fujimori of Peru, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Putin of Russia and
Viktor Orban of Hungary. Now we believe that these leaders actually accomplish many of the same goals as the old dictators, they achieve a similar
concentration of power, they eliminate checks and balances. But they managed to do so
with much less violence or even fear in the general population. They have no official ideology, they tend to share a kind
of anti-Western resentment, their rhetoric is somewhat anti-Western but there's no systematic ideology. They imitate democracy, they
pretend to be democratic. And at least some of the time, they seem to be genuinely popular. Now we're not saying that there are no old style dictators left, here are a couple. And we're also not saying
that all earlier dictators were extremely violent,
there were some exceptions. But what we are saying is
that the balance has shifted. So, there are far fewer of what we term fear dictators today, and far more of what
we term spin dictators. The key idea of spin dictatorship, this increasingly prevalent model is that instead of scaring
people into obedience, dictators can achieve the same objective, get the same level of control by manipulating information to project an image of
competent leadership. So in the book, we discuss how we collected various kinds of data to measure the various
aspects of this model of spin dictatorship and the contrasting model
of fear dictatorship. We constructed database about the level of political violence under different regimes,
use of ideology and so on and came up with some
empirical rules of thumb. And using those, this
is the picture we see of how cohorts of leaders
in non-democratic countries have changed over time. So this shows the percentage of dictators in each period, in each decade who fit the definition
of fear dictatorship and the percentage that fit the definition of spin dictatorship. And we see a very sharp drop in the proportion of fear
dictators from the 1970s and a corresponding increase
in portion of spin dictators. So let me say a little bit
about how these two models, these two styles of dictatorship differ. well, fear dictatorships of
course, rule through fear, the dictator tries to spread terror and to control the
population through that. Spin dictators on the other hand, try to rule through deception. And in the book we show evidence of a quite pronounced decrease in the use of political
violence by the state in authoritarian regimes
since the 1970s and 1980s. So we show that the leaders
of authoritarian states that came to power more recently, have overseen far smaller
number of political killings than in the past, the old
fear, dictators oversaw large numbers of political killings, more recent dictators, far fewer, the old fear dictators held large numbers of political prisoners, far fewer of the new spin dictators hold large numbers of political prisoners. And unfortunately, the
vast majority of dictators in both periods, right
through till the present have an accused of torturing
political prisoners, but the rates have gone
down in recent decades. It's not just that fear dictators use fear and are violently repressive, they try to publicize their violence because the point is to scare people. By contrast, spin dictators, not only use less violent repression, when they do use violence, they try to conceal it or camouflage it because overt violent repression would undercut their image of competent democratic leadership. So let me just give a
couple of striking examples, illustrations of this. On the one hand, we have a fear dictator like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya who made fun of leaders in other states that tried to conceal the fact when they had political opponents killed, they concealed it by having them run over by cars or poisoned. He said, "we do not do that, he whom we have executed, we
have executed on television." So this is a classic statement of the fear to dictator admitting that the real goal is not
just to kill his opponents, but to make sure that
everybody knows about it. Here is a case of a spin
dictator, Putin, I should say, started out as one of the
classic spin dictators of pioneer of spin dictatorship. In recent years, he has shifted strategy, reverted back to a pretty
clear fear dictatorship. But in earlier years, he was
very much on the side of spin. So, the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov murdered in Central Moscow in 2015, what does Putin have to say about it? Well, "we need to finally rid Russia of disgraces and tragedies, like the provocative
murder of Boris Nemstov right in the center of the capital." He's shocked, had nothing
to do with it whatsoever. Now, spin dictators have
come up with various ingenious alternatives
to overt repression, one of these is rather than
arresting political opponents, putting them in jail
for 10 years or longer, they arrest them for short spells, it's kind of a revolving
door detention system. So repeatedly arrest
them for short spells, not long enough to get
an organized protest from Human Rights Organization. So for instance, Ilya Yashin
political opposition leader tried to run for Moscow City Council, he was arrested five times in a row for short terms during that period. Another trick is to
prosecute political opponents for ostensibly non-political crimes. So rather than revealing
that you're a dictator who wants to prevent any other individuals from challenging their rule, you find some apparently
non-political reason to put them in jail and
disqualify them from running. So for instance, Erdogan,
who also was a spin dictator early on and has now become more violent. Erdogan arrested this Kurdish
politician Nurettin Demirtas for are allegedly using
a fake health certificate to avoid military service. And this captures the underlying logic in the sense that the dictator
wants to accuse his rivals of something that's
not only non-political, but also in some sense embarrassing, that might discredit them
with their supporters, so this makes the guy
looked like a coward. Now, one of the key elements
of spin dictatorship is first of all, to hold elections, to pretend you're democratic, but then to manipulate
them so that you always win or your party always wins. How do they do that? Well, less often do dictators outright ban opposition candidates here, this is data from Hyde and Marinov based on electoral observation missions. And they show that in the '80s, a high proportion of
non-democratic regimes had actual bans of opposition candidates. We see that goes down pretty
dramatically from the 1990s, but what do they do instead? Well, here is the proportion that election observers considered harassed opposition candidates, and we see that going up. And here is the proportion that where judge to
have imposed media bias, biased the media against non-incumbents. So these are the substitutes
that they turn to. Other differences between
the old fear model and the new spin model, well, unlike many few dictators, as I said, there's no official ideology in spin dictatorships, they also, in their speeches, they use a rhetoric of competence rather than a rhetoric of fear. And we did some basic
text analysis of speeches by 18 leaders in democracies, fear dictatorships, and spin dictatorships to check this and see what
the patterns look like. And here, this graph plots
for each of these leaders, that the proportion of words we found in a selection of their speeches that had to do with on
the one hand violence on the X axis and on the other hand, economic performance or
public services on the Y axis. And of course, as we expected, we found the Democrats in
blue, tended to be higher on talk of economic
performance and public service than the fear dictators in red and also lower in general,
on terms related to violence. Eisenhower is a bit of an exception, but that's because
Eisenhower was president during a very intense period
of the cold war, the 1950s in which there was a lot
of talk about missiles and Soviet threat and so on, so he comes out a little
bit high on the violence. But the real, really striking thing for us was where the spin dictators in green, Italics fell on this graph and it turns out that they
blend in with the Democrats rather than with the fear
dictators in the rhetorical style. And in fact, two of them, Lee Kuan Yew and Nazarbayev used even more vocabulary of economic
performance and public services than the democratic leaders. So spin dictators present
themselves as Democrats and work hard to see necessarily
they're doing a good job providing services, managing the economy, and they manipulate the media in order to ensure that
that image is projected. And in the book, we talk about evidence that they are actually genuinely
popular, at least a time. So the goal of this strategy is to avoid having to force
people to vote for you by manipulating information so that they genuinely want to. Okay, if there's been this big change from fear dictatorship
to spin dictatorship, at least in the balance of types, why is this happened? Well in the book, and this
is gonna be very brief and schematic here to keep this short, in the book we argue that
the change has been driven by a combination of
modernization and globalization. Of course, modernization theory, classic theory, in political science that says that modernization
and perhaps globalization, tend to lead to democracy. And we agree with that,
but we add two revisions. First of all, what matters is not just modernization
within a given country, it's not just that that drives the country to become more democratic, it's economic development, education, other aspects of modernization worldwide. So both the process within
countries and the process aggregated across the world. So as more and more countries worldwide develop economically and become
more globally integrated, we see the emergence of global
movements for human rights, global movements for democracy and so on, which can create pressures even in individual countries
that are not so modern to adopt democratic institutions so that we make that addition or revision of modernization theory. And of course, the second important point is that we argue that dictators
facing these pressures caused by democratization
and globalization can delay the transition to democracy, at least for a while, by
adopting the techniques of spin. So modern societies are harder
to control through terror, dictators come under pressure
to adopt a new strategy, but rather than immediately
going to full democracy, they can at least temporarily resist by faking democracy by using
the techniques of spin. So if that's right, what's the future hold for authoritarian regimes? Well, if modernization and
globalization continue, that should increase the pressure on fear dictators to adopt spin and also the pressure on spin
dictators to democratize. On the other hand, if modernization stalls and globalization reverses, well, we won't necessarily
see that happening. When the strategy of spin fails, and it can fail because
of economic crisis, which undermines the dictators, reduces the dictators resources, or spin can become more difficult to use because society becomes too modern. So really the only remaining stable system with that sort of society's democracy. Spin dictators in that circumstance, do sometimes try to hold onto
power by reverting to fear, to the old techniques
of violent repression. And we've seen this in Venezuela with the change from Chavez, a spin dictator to Maduro, a fear dictator also in Turkey and in Russia where we've seen both, Erdogan and Putin start out as really
innovative spin dictators using information manipulation and becoming genuinely popular, moving from that to a strategy
based on large scale arrests and more overt attempts to
intimidate the population, so that that can happen. But controlling modern
globalized societies with violent repression is really hard and it tends to undermine the economy. So Venezuela, Turkey, Russia are all doing pretty badly economically. So we see that as a temporary fix that a dictator can use to
try and preserve his power, but it's problematic and
probably can't last indefinitely. Okay, so how should Western
democracies respond? We have some suggestions in the book, they go under the heading of what we call, Adversarial Engagement. We don't think that the west
can simply choose to decouple from all the authoritarian states, it's just not possible in the
current state of the world. Environmental threats,
pathogens, ideas, cross borders, whether we like that or not. So we need to remain engaged
with even authoritarian states, but we need to do so in a smarter way than has been done in the past, which means we need better
monitoring of these ties with authoritarian governments. We need to welcome modernization
even in our adversaries because the one thing that is worse than say a China that's modernizing is a China that's
blocked from modernizing, I think we would find
that even more aggressive than a China that is integrating with the world and becoming more modern. We need to reform at home, we need to defend and reform
international institutions which are often covertly subverted by spin dictators and fear
dictators, I should say, but it's a great trick of spin dictators to try and use the tools
that they use at home from the manipulating public opinion and co-opting elite allies
to use those techniques in the international arena to try and undermine Western cohesion and increase their global influence. And we need to around the world support democracy democratically, we don't think that using military force to try and introduce democracy
in other countries works, we see very little evidence of that. But we think a building
an international coalition behind democracy and
building this coalition on truly democratic principles is really the best strategy going forward. So just to wrap up quickly,
we see this new model, or at least increasingly
prevalent model of dictatorship edging out, although not
completely fear dictatorship, the essential ideas to use less terror, less ideological brainwashing and more subtle information
manipulation of spin dictators, fake democracy but manipulate elections. They emphasize this rhetoric
of competence and effectiveness rather than a rhetoric of fear. This model is emerging because
it's better adapted to life in a world with open borders,
economic interdependence, global media and highly educated Publics. But eventually those very same trends make spin unsustainable and then democracy's really
the only stable option. But as I said, still dictators
often try to resist that in extremists, by reverting
to old style repression and that can work for a while. Thank you very much, I'll stop there and we'll be delighted to answer questions and Sergei's gonna take the lead on that. - Great, thank you so much, Dan, let me ask you to stop
sharing your screen, although the cover of
the book is fantastic. Alright, so Sergei, I wanted
to talk a little bit to start on the evolution of the Putin Regime and how it fits into the
explanation that you have. We may recall that Andrei
Shleifer had a famous book in 2005 called, "A Normal Country", where he argued that yes, Russia had corruption, tainted elections, an insecure press, a weak judiciary, but this was pretty normal
for a middle income country like Russia or Argentina
or Mexico or Romania. And in your book, you say
that that's basically true until 2012 and the big
demonstrations in 2010, 2011, freak out the Putin team so much that they then shift to
the spin dictatorship way of governing. But from Dan's presentation here, it's clear that there's also
another inflection point when they move away from
spin and back to fear. Could you talk a little bit about how you see that
evolution taking place? - Thank you very much Alexandra, indeed Putin's regime is one of our main inspirations for the book and it's change really teaches us a lot about how spin dictatorships evolve. So we based the book on the quantitative research we've done, and one of the papers
we've written and published is "The Research and Popularity
of Authoritarian Leaders", where we essentially quantitatively test the old conjecture by Adam Przeworski, who said that authoritarian
equilibrium rest on lies, fear and economic prosperity. And we show in our work that in recent years, lies in
economic prosperity matter, actually fear, not so
much fear can backfire, but I should say that our data set includes mostly spin dictatorships rather than fear dictatorships just because it's harder
to measure popularity in fear dictatorships but in any event, when we think about Putin's regime, if you think roughly about
Putin's regime before Crimea, this is a regime based on
legitimacy of economic prosperity, due to economic prosperity. And this is what Dan has written about and there is a 2011 paper by Dan, which shows how economic
achievements of Putin's regime actually are correlated with
his political popularity. Now, then as Putin builds his
model of running the state where he centralizes political power, when he gives the spoils of
economic growth to his friends as corruptions going up as
state captures demanding heights of the economy, the
growth is disappearing. Economy is slowing down and with that popularity
of Putin is going down. And so he discovers that he can actually find something else, he finds new legitimacy in annexed Crimea. And Crimian war, an extension of Crimea is a typical spin war, it's the war where you
don't kill a lot of people, you grab the territory, but you grab it in a very adroit way, in a very unusual way
where you don't actually fight a big war like we are observing now. And so his popularity is going up and so he can continue
running the spin dictatorship. Economy is not growing anymore, economy is actually stagnating but he manages to spin
the narrative that, well, your incomes are not growing but it's still better
than the alternative. And so, we would say that the
spin dictatorship continued until very, very recently. And in a sense, when
Putin started this war, he was looking for a replay of 2014, how can we judge that? We can see that he did not
introduce full censorship until a week after the war. So he didn't actually close
down independent media, which is a typical feature
of a spin dictatorship but spin dictators pretend
to have independent media. They limit their reach to the public, but they still say, look, we still have Ekho Moskvy,
Echo of Moscow radio station Novaya Gazeta newspaper, TV Rain, Independent Online TV channel. These are small media,
but still, they exist and so he didn't shut
them down before the war because he thought the war would last for three or four days and then he's fine. Now, as he saw that the war is not short and not really victorious and as he saw that independent media really destroy his popularity in the first few days after the war, then he introduced something which we don't observe
in spin dictatorships, which is wartime censorship and closure of all independent media. And in that sense, I think the
transformation of the regime, which is not yet complete in a sense that you can
still use YouTube channels. And for example, what
we are talking about now can be viewed in Russia despite what we are talking now about is completely against Russian
laws on military censorship. But so it's still not fully complete, we are still not back to Sterling's times and yet the transformation is there. Now, this book came out last week but we finished writing
this book a year ago. And already a year ago in May, 2021, we said that this
transformation is underway. So actually in the draft, we refer to a survey run by
Levada Center in March, 2021, published in April, 2021
on Levada's website, which says that more
than half of Russians, are afraid of the return
of mass repression. And that was the first
time in Russian history, in modern Russian history,
in postoric Russian history, when Russians understood they have to fear something like this. And so this is when we
see that it's not just Putin, does kill journalists or put in does repress
opposition activists but he does that in the way
that public starts to notice and that's a big difference. So previously before 2021, he would kill or imprison
political opposition leaders in a way that the public thought we still live in a democracy. By spring 2021, the situation
was already going thus far, that Russian started to notice and you could see the transformation. And again, during 2021, he really introduced
more and more censorship, designating media foreign agents and undesirable organizations, kicking out foreign media, announcing that Navalny's Organization is an extremist organization. Previously Navalny would be
put in jail on fraud charges like Dan was talking about,
non-political charges. But now we see that there is literally political censorship, increasing number of political prisoners, direct political accusations
against their opposition. So this is the transformation
we are observing. So if we want to know
when the transformation from spin to fear happened, I would actually say pretty much, now, even though this transformation
was happening before, Dan has mentioned that that has
happened in other countries. So Venezuela moved from
spin dictator Chavez to fear dictator Maduro,
and so it's not unusual. However, the reason why this has happened is exactly the
modernization, globalization and the use of new
communication technology. So, Putin had a complete control of TV yet Navalny was more social-media-savvy. So he used YouTube to a
great advantage over Putin. And I honestly believe that
the reason Navalny was poisoned was exactly because the election coming up in September, 2020 was a problem for Putin exactly because Navalny, every week would go onto his YouTube channel and reach out to millions. And so in that sense, I think our theory is not refuted
by Putin's transformation from spin to fear but unfortunately not every spin dictator says, sorry, I can no
longer maintain my regime, I have to step down
and let democracy work. But that doesn't mean
that all spin dictators become fear dictators. We saw how Ecuador moved from Korea, Rafael Correa to democracy. We saw how Armenian spin dictatorships transformed a year later in 2018. So, many spin dictatorships
actually they vest themselves and move in the direction of democracy. - So let me just follow up on that, you know, it's interesting
because I had thought that when you talk about
modernization and globalization, creating pressure on
the spin dictatorship, the assumption was like, they have to eventually
give into the openness and become less dictator
like, and more democracy like, but the Russian example actually suggests that it might be more common for spin dictatorships
to end by reverting back to a fear dictatorship. Do you see examples of kind of
the movement back and forth? In other words, like, would we consider that maybe Putin would go
back to the spin dictatorship because it's a little easier
to control after the war or, does that just seem
much more difficult to do in that direction? - So when you introduced us, you mentioned the word science many times so we believe in the power of our models. And so in our model, a spin
dictator can fool the voters in pretending to be a Democrat. And I guess after this war, it'll be very hard for
Putin to fool people that he is a democratic
leader of a free society. And I think it's very, very hard to think that Putin will be able to
move back to spin dictatorship. So transformations all
like this are so traumatic then I think for Putin in particular, it'll be very hard to
reemerge as a new Democrat. So some dictators go hard
and then go back soft and so Francisco Franco was one example. So nothing is impossible but our theoretical models
don't allow for this. But again, all theoretical models and all empirical data are based on what we've observed before and maybe Putin will surprise us, I guess Dan wants to add something. - Yeah, could I just
add a couple of words? So yeah, on Franco, just to clarify, never became a spin dictator, he became a slightly less, he used less violent to
get the message across that people should be afraid. Individual leaders,
this is as Sergei said, individual leaders find it very difficult to go back from a strategy of fear to one of spin because
they've, as Sergei said exposed their true
character as very violent, oppressive non-democratic leaders. But countries can go back and forth and we've seen Malaysia, for instance, sort of teetering on the edge, going from spin dictatorship
to what looked like, maybe imperfect democracy,
maybe back to spin dictatorship, so that can happen. To get back to what you
started with Alexandra, you mentioned the argument that Russia was a normal
country in the early 2,000s. That's actually a piece of
work that I contributed to, I worked on that with guts. And so just to explain what I think about that
period at this point, I think Russia is best
classified as a flawed democracy, right at the beginning of the 2,000s, it becomes something
like a spin dictatorship really from, well, the
middle of the 2,000s. And that's not abnormal, in fact, the point of our book is that among authoritarian states spin really becomes the normal
type from around that time. And a lot of countries
were still authoritarian. So the kind of the model country
in the world at that point is something on the
border of dirty democracy and soft authoritarianism
of a spin variety. Then as I would reiterate
what Sergei said, we see this progression, we see as a move to maybe
some kind of hybrid regime around crimea and after crimea, and then moved to full fledged fear dictatorship very recently, just to do a bit of self advertising, I have an article out in foreign affairs that came out a few days ago on exactly that issue on why
Putin moved from spin to fear. And basically our argument
is, as, Sergei said, the pressures from modernization, from expansion of YouTube in Russia, from Navalny's Organization and so on made spin look less effective but I'd also add an element
of contingent evolution of Putin's thought, you know, the leader does matter and he could have responded
to these challenges in different ways but he
chose a particular way which can be understood as
part of a historical process of something happening in his
mind and in his surroundings rather than something
that was fully determined by the structural factors
of the environment. - So we have a question that challenges some of the modernization theory that you've drawn in the book. I'm going to read it just to make sure that I get all of the
elements of the question. Why would one assume that
democracy is the stable outcome in a world of globalization
when at the same time you've empirically seen increase
in authoritarian regimes? Reversal towards the fear dictatorship is also an actual empirical fact that speaks against modernization theory. Moreover, the 20th century dictatorships were extremely modern projects that wanted to modernize society. Meanwhile, in the west where democracies have long been assumed to be consolidated, are seeing serious
erosions of institutions in democratic norms. So why does modernization theory play such a big role in your argument? What alternative arguments
have you considered? For example, one season the
excellent graph that you showed, the rise of spin dictators
occurs around the 1970s, which is also the time when
neoliberalism starts to spread. Isn't this a better explanation
for what's happening? - Sergei do you wanna - I suggest that Dan takes this question because Dan actually looked at the numbers of the democratic
recession in recent decade. And I think nobody knows
whether in the future all countries become
democratic or dictatorial but over the last 200 years, I think the trend is very clear. 200 years ago we had no
democracies and today, depending on how you count but you may say that
majority of human kind leads democracies and majority
of countries lead democracies but much of that depends on how you, Dan please go ahead. - Yeah, so exactly, I mean,
if you look at a graph, any graph produced by just about any Democracy Rating Organization, a graph of the portion of
democratic states in the world. It's a dramatic rise over the
course of the 20th century and the recent democratic recession, I argue has been exaggerated, there has been some plateauing
and some backsliding, mostly in the quality of democracy, so from liberal democracy
to illiberal democracy. But it really doesn't change the overall picture much at all. And it's a much more moderate, so far reversion than we saw it after the previous two waves. So democracy has advanced
in three waves so far in each a big spurt, a big surge in the number of democracies followed by, in the first two waves, some reversion in the 1930s
and then in the 1960s, 70s followed by another big surge in the surge from the mid
70s to the early 2000s, the third wave was so dramatic that really just based
on the characteristics of the countries that
were swept into democracy during that period, we should expect a certain
amount of backsliding because a lot of poorer,
less modern countries became democratic at that time. And this relates to the point that I mentioned that
we think what matters is not just the modernization
level within a given country, but the modernization level
of the world as a whole. So I don't accept that
modernization theory is inconsistent with the pattern of evolution
of countries around the world but we would also say
that the dictatorships in the 20th century, I mean,
you can call them modern, but their level of income was far below most democracies today. They were also at a particular
stage of modernization, which was industrialization. Now we don't think, and
this is perhaps another way we differ with the classic
modernization theory. We don't think that industrialization necessarily leads to democracy, it can, but sometimes it doesn't. We have much stronger beliefs about the post-industrial transition, the transition to a knowledge economy. And we think that that
type of modernization is particularly likely to lead not immediately necessarily, but in the long run over time
to more democratic order. The third point about
neoliberalism in the 1970s, I mean, the big change
that we see is a bit later, it's more the '80s and '90s, I would be interested to
know exactly what mechanism, the questionnaire thinks
connects neoliberalism to a change in the type
of authoritarian rule. It wasn't something we thought about, we did think about the
alternative argument that perhaps what has really
changed is technological that all these great tools
for dictators have emerged, like facial recognition technology, surveillance technologies, the GPS tracking internet
surveillance tools, and that, that has just reduced the level of violence that's necessary for a fear dictator to use because they can target so well. The problem with that argument is there's no reason why
having all these tools should make you necessarily want to change from terrifying the population to pretending to be democratic and faking democracy and
allowing independent media. And in fact, some countries like China, continue to try and
control the population, basically through fear,
definitely with regard to Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong but also, you know,
staging forced confessions of dissidents on TV to send the message of intimidation really to the population. So combining continued emphasis on fear with these new high tech tools, I mean, that's as plausible
a response to the technology as using the technology in
a very different approach, consisting with spin. So we weren't convinced
by that alternative possible explanation but on neoliberalism, I would need to think more and hear more about what link is actually meant between neoliberalism and change
in authoritarian strategy. - Let me just follow up
on your mention of China, we do have a question asking if Xi Jinping is best categorized as a spin
dictator or a fear dictator. - I think Dan has correctly said that we think of modern China as a fear dictatorship, very different one from mouse in the sense that it uses different tools, digital tools, modern technological tools but still at fear dictatorship. Exactly for that reason
that Dan has mentioned, they show forced confessions
of dissidents on TV, they advertise fear. And this is very different
from spin dictatorship. In the book we say that before Xi Jinping, it looked like China, like
Singapore, for example, was moving into introducing more freedom and probably moving in the
direction of spin dictatorship. But then the course was changed and the many things which
are changing in China now, including removal of term
limits, effectively this year, but overall the country is going not in the direction of spin dictatorship. And China is not alone, we also mentioned Saudi Arabia Emirates. Overall, our argument is
majority of the regimes, non democratic regions
around the world today are spin dictatorships, but
that doesn't mean that 100% are. - So let's talk about the forces that put pressure on
the spin dictatorships, modernization, and globalization. So I would ask first, you know, and this is one of the questions we have, what are your predictions for the evolution of modernization? Will it continue at the same pace as what we've seen before? And similarly for globalization, and I would say maybe we need to treat the question of Russia separately because it's been to some extent unplugged from the global economy
through the sanctions. - Sergei do you wanna take it or should I? - Okay, let me let say something. So, we cut our sample in various ways and we've actually seen
that Russia and Singapore are outliers in the sense that
they're not fully modernized, but they're quite modernized, they're close to developed
economies in many ways in terms of technological sophistication and level of education
urbanization, so on. And they still, until very recently, Russia as well, remains spin dictatorships and didn't move to democracy. Now, the difference is Singapore
was moving and is moving, has been moving towards more freedoms. On the other hand, Russia
definitely was not. And one of the explanations, and I think it's a very important issue. So Dan was talking about how what matters is critical
thinking, creativity, not just being able to
solve differential equations which matter for building
industrial plants and rockets, but also things that we
teach in social science. And that's exactly where Russia was weak during Soviet times and where it has not really caught
up in the last 30 years. And so it's not just
education, which matters but things we teach in
social science disciplines which matters. And this is where statistics
in Russia can be misleading because we see a lot of educated people but these people don't
really know history, don't really know economics,
political science, sociology. They don't understand
how rule of law works. And in that sense, I think we
shouldn't be misled by this but overall, you're right. Globalization matters
and we see actually today how painful the move from spin to fear is, Russia being decoupled
from the global economy is going to cause huge recession. And a lot of Russians
are extremely unhappy with what's happening. Exactly because it's much
easier to be a spin dictator in a globalized economy
than the feared one and the recession which
is going on right now is a cost of moving from
spin to fear in the world, which is so modernized and globalized. - Let me just add a very, very briefly on the question of are
modernization and globalization going to continue worldwide? I don't know, I have learned not to try and make predictions, definitely
not on such big topics but what I can do is quibble with some of the predictions
that other people are making. So some people have already suggested that we are in a period
of de-globalization, I don't see that in the data yet. Trade has plateaued,
global trade has plateaued, but it hasn't clearly fallen yet. And in various ways, although they've been serious disruptions in the last few years due to COVID, due to other things, now the war, we don't see a clear downward trend yet, it could happen, but hasn't yet and I wouldn't assume it will. Same with modernization,
countries continue to develop. And I think in Russia, what's really fascinating
is that you can see Putin coming back to the Kremlin in 2012 as trying to freeze modernization as recognizing that modernization
is the problem for him in the sense that it produces
these social outbursts and opposition to him but he fails. Rates of enrollment it in higher
education continue to rise, they're already very high. When he comes back in 2012,
they continued to rise. Internet penetration spreads, and it's 3G, Sergei has
an interesting paper on the spread of 3G,
mobile internet systems. So, it's 3G and higher, which means people are really using videos and YouTube becomes the
world's fifth largest market, Russia becomes YouTube's fifth
largest market in the world. So, and the things which
are exchanged on YouTube, the videos really change public discourse. So Putin realizes that
he's facing a challenge, which is growing and he has to decide, does he somehow try to manage this in a sophisticated way in line with his previous
efforts or does he switch? And I think he gives up
on his political fixers, the people in the Kremlin who are supposed to manipulate the public, people in the media and so
on, he gives up on them. He, thinks they're not succeeding and he turns to the security services and that's really when
the shift to fear begins because of this modernization pressure. - So the connection you've both made between higher education and modernization is interesting in light of the brain drain that's happening now from Russia. A lot of people are asking, will Putin close the borders
to keep all of these IT people and professors in the country. And I know Sergei has said that in fact, like, it's good for Putin if
these people leave the country, is that the ongoing effort
to freeze modernization or to slow it at least? - Yes, I see those rumors that the country will be closed and there will be introduction,
exit visas and so on as actually the way to push people out by disseminating the rumors that the border will be closed tomorrow, you make sure that people leave today. And Putin has repeatedly,
but Putin can change as Silver Bruce Scottney
has said, repeatedly Putin has changed, Putin is
no longer the nice Putin, his friend Silver has known. But Putin has repeatedly
said that when people leave, that's their choice. And indeed for Putin, when people leave, it's reducing the pressure on the regime, so I think he will push people out. However, and we've been
facing this criticism quite a few times when we
send our papers to journals, but if it is, would ask us,
okay, what is about immigration? Maybe everybody will leave, maybe modernization is not such a problem because everybody will leave. And I think Russia is a big country, everybody just can't leave. And so there'll be enough people as long as there is YouTube enough people will watch
YouTube, will learn things. And so that will still
be a problem for Putin. On the other hand, Putin can completely block
YouTube, Telegram channels and build one big to North Korea. So it's anybody's guess, but indeed, I don't think Putin is
going to close the border, it's not in his interest, he wants to push people out. - Sorry Alex, just one sentence. This relates to the point we make that modernization theory, it's not just about
modernization within a country, it's about modernization worldwide. All these people who
lead with tech skills, higher education, you know,
it's a global arena now. And so they can affect
what's happening in Russia much more than in the past from outside. And so they continue to produce journalism of the highest level we see against for we see Medusa and so on continuing to have this influence. So you can, you can push
'em out of the country, but that doesn't silence them necessarily. - Well, Dan, that is a great point because we have a question here which is how else can
Russia's civil society and democratic diaspora
respond to the war in Ukraine and the deterioration
of political expressions in light of your theory of autocracy? - I would just repeat what I just said, and then Sergei can take over, but yes, they can do a lot from outside by investigating, by organizing and by communicating with people inside and there's still channels available and if those get closed, then new ones need to be created. So I think that's how
they can affect things. They can work on changing
public opinion within Russia. It's hard, we've all seen these
reports of people in Russia who refuse to believe
that there's anything but bad neo-Nazis in Kiev. But I think that's what
the more modern part of Russian society that has left so far can be doing but maybe
Sergei wants to add. - No, I fully agree, I will just add that indeed in this question, Stanislav refers to our informational theory of autocracy so I would like to clarify what we used to call
informational autocracy is the same as spin dictatorship but informational autocracy emphasizes that informational sphere
is the main battleground. And this is where the faith and the survival of
those regimes is decided. And that's why things like
YouTube or Telegram channels are the main battleground. And now the big question is why YouTube is still not blocked in Russia? - That was my next question. - Yes and I think it's a great question and we don't know for sure, but one reason could be
that the is regime observes that the top 10 most
downloaded applications on App Store in Russia is I think eight out of top 10 is VPNs and it's very hard to stop Russians to go around the censorship. And maybe they tried to close Instagram and they saw that people just download VPN and continue to access social networks. And so I'm sure that our
audience is well informed but just to emphasize in Russia, Meta, the organization
that built Facebook, formerly known as Facebook is actually designated as
an extremist organization on par with Taliban or Islamic state. So Putin knows it's a threat, but it's not necessarily
true he can block it. It's like in Soviet
times they try to block, to jam Radio Liberty
and Radio Free Europe, but they didn't always succeed. And I think this is the main battleground and the answer to the question is exactly like Dan said, we need to deliver information
to Russian society. - So, I've been asking
myself this question, it's very interesting that it's not that Russians are not seeing
the destruction in Ukraine, they're seeing the same
CNN videos of Mariupol because they're being
rebroadcast on Russian television but Russian television, state television is reinterpreting what's happening as illustrations of the Nazis random mark and destroying Ukraine. So, the problem is actually
much more complicated than showing Russians what's happening and assuming that they'll be outrage, it's somehow you need to
explain what's happening is completely different
from the explanation that you're being offered. And it seems to me that that's actually an extremely complicated task. - Yes, I agree with that, entirely, it's not a
matter of just providing supposedly neutral and
reliable information to people, it's forging an emotional connection, it's using networks of trust because unless people trust the informer, they're not going to accept the message. And the way that I think about it is with the theory of
cognitive dissonance, people have all these reasons why it's painful and
difficult and unpleasant to accept this piece of information that are coming from Ukraine, that their country is
committing war crimes, destroying residential areas in Ukraine. So, they'll resist the theory
of cognitive dissonance says, when you feel dissonance,
you try to reduce it. But the easiest way to reduce it is just to disbelieve
the dissonant claims. But at a certain point,
as the claims accumulate, you may tip from rejecting
all this unpleasant evidence to giving up on your assumptions, your initial assumptions. But another part of that which is crucial is emotional connection. And people very strongly try to share the beliefs
of the people around them, the people they trust and that makes it even more difficult to get them to change their position. But it also means that once
some people in these communities start shifting and talking
to the people around them and saying, look, we've been lied to, it's not true, then because of the close
relationships of trust they have with the people around them, that can spread and that can spread fast, so we might see that in the future. - Sergei, would you like the last word? - Yeah, I fully agree
with what Dan has said, and I would just say that
the government is scared of alternative visual messages and then mentioned our
work on 3G and 4G internet. And there we actually use, we were asked by refugees
to produce some case studies and one of the case studies we produced was the story of Navalny
destroying Medvedev's reputation. This paper was published before
the palace video of 2021, so it was about 2017 video about Medvedev. And so Medvedev film about
Medvedev and his seven palaces was never shown on Russian TV, it was only showed on YouTube and that completely destroyed
Medvedev's approval rating and Medvedev never
recovered as a politician, it was viewed 40 million times, it sparked demonstration and Russian government
took notice, of course, and as audience of Navalny was going up and as correctly outlined
emphasized by that, Navalny is one person who
can establish empathy, can establish a more emotional connection. He's especially dangerous,
he's a trusted source and so he's a special dangerous for Putin, that's why I think he was poisoned in 2020 because Russian government could not any longer tolerate the growth of his audience on YouTube. And finally, let me again, emphasize, yes, it's very hard to get
through Russian propaganda but Russian propaganda
is super well funded. We just saw the data that in March, 2022, the budget of Russian propaganda
is three times as large as it's budget a year before, and then another thing is, it's not a coincidence
that Facebook was banned. Remember, WhatsApp is not banned, even though it belongs to the very same extremist
organization Meta, but Facebook and Instagram was banned exactly because that's where
you can get information from trusted sources, your friends. And in that sense, propaganda is powerful but the very fact that
propaganda is scared and government is scared, suggests that it's not omnipotent. - All right, that's the
perfect place to stop, Sergei, it's a slight note of optimism in an otherwise rather grim picture. Sergei Guriev and Dan Treisman, thank you so much for being with us for talking about your fabulous book. And I hope everyone uses that discount and buys three copies. Bye everybody, thank you for joining us. - Thank you.
