Introduction and Contribution

Nearly half of the world (46%) lives in authoritarian regimes that hold regular elections — compared to 28% who live in autocracies without elections and 26% who live under democracy. In these “electoral autocracies,” the ruling party can theoretically lose power, but its ability to repress and co-opt its opponents makes defeat unlikely. Incumbent executives and parties in electoral autocracies have become increasingly sophisticated in their repressive techniques and increasingly connected to other regimes that share similar fears of democracy. “How can electoral authoritarianism be resisted?” is thus a pressing question for domestic opposition parties and civil society organizations (CSOs) as well as international actors seeking to promote democracy, including governments, nonprofits, think tanks, and academics. 

In “Opposition strategies and electoral challenges under autocracy,” Oren Samet analyzes five strategies opposition parties use to fight electoral authoritarianism during campaigns, on election day, and after polls have closed. These are: joining multiparty coalitions, strengthening their party organization, mobilizing mass protests, boycotting elections, and seeking international assistance. Samet shows that each strategy entails tradeoffs, increasing opposition competitiveness while making authoritarian repression more likely or efficient. For example, joining a multiparty coalition can both increase the incumbent’s likelihood of defeat and increase his propensity to repress — insofar as he perceives the opposition as popular and threatening.

Samet offers several prescriptions for international democracy promoters. First, they must collaborate with domestic opposition parties, because only they — and not CSOs — can win elections. Yet many international actors avoid this approach; for instance, some opposition parties may care more about power than democracy, or collaborating with them may invite criticism that democracy promotion is partisan. While these risks cannot be ignored, neither can political parties.

A second prescription follows from the fact that oppositions have at least five tools at their disposal: there can be no single “best practice” in democracy promotion; it requires flexibility, adaptability, and an integrated approach. Finally, because autocrats continue to become more sophisticated, democracy promoters must take steps to prepare for the repression of their partners. 

Five Approaches and Their Pitfalls

Otherwise effective strategies for winning democratic elections — such as running savvy campaigns on primetime television that are informed by public opinion polling — will not work for opposition parties under electoral autocracy. This is because the system is structurally biased toward incumbents. As such, one common approach has been for individual opposition parties to join together in a coalition: sharing policy platforms, endorsing joint candidates, and merging their party organizations. And indeed, multiparty coalitions are statistically associated with higher vote shares and a higher likelihood that autocrats are defeated. At the same time, however, such coalitions are difficult to form and sustain due to ideological differences and polarization. In especially repressive electoral autocracies, such as Ethiopia or Cambodia, incumbent parties are often able to neutralize or eliminate coalitions. Finally, when coalitions pose a serious challenge on election day but without winning, autocrats may repress even harder.

A second strategy involves strengthening party organization, for example, by improving its geographic reach or recruiting more professional candidates. These efforts can increase competitiveness and popular appeal, but they risk providing the incumbent with a large amount of information that he can use to more efficiently target his opponents. This includes formal lists of members, candidates, and party branch locations. Meanwhile, more organized opposition parties may inadvertently legitimize the system by affording it some semblance of democracy.

Encouraging mass protests is a third strategy available to opposition parties. As the number of protesters grows, authoritarian repression becomes more costly and more likely to backfire, while the incumbent’s allies become more likely to defect and join the opposition. Parties help with this process by translating protester demands into coherent party platforms. However, and especially after the 2010-12 Arab Uprisings, electoral authoritarian regimes have become highly sensitive to and ready to combat protests. This may be accomplished via surveillance or assistance from powerful third parties such as China or Russia.

A fourth, common strategy has been for parties to boycott the autocrat’s electoral facade. Doing so signals to the international community that the playing field is skewed and the system illegitimate. Yet boycotts can lead to missed opportunities for the opposition to build electoral strength, influence policy change as legislative minorities, or monitor the autocrat from inside government. In addition, they rob oppositions of the chance to take advantage of the autocrat’s miscalculations, which may even lead to his defeat. 

Finally, opposition parties can reach out to international actors for support. This may involve requesting that they sanction the regime or intervene in the name of democracy. International pressure can indeed encourage political openings and is especially useful for oppositions with low visibility. However, autocrats are adept at demonizing those who use this strategy as agents of malign foreign influence. These appeals can strengthen the autocrat’s domestic support base among those who see him as protecting the nation. In all, these tradeoffs suggest that effective democracy promotion requires a deep understanding of the political context in which oppositions operate.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

This essay first appeared in The Diplomat.

For decades, South Korean strategy rested on a stable hierarchy within the international order. The alliance with the United States provided security; Seoul then managed relations with Japan, Europe, China, and regional institutions around that anchor. The alliance remains indispensable, but Seoul can no longer assume that this foundation will stay stable.

The evidence is visible in the way Washington now deals with allies. In 2025, the United States initially announced sharply differentiated “reciprocal” tariffs on South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. Negotiations later produced a 15 percent baseline framework for all three, but the process mattered as much as the final rate. Trade access, industrial investment, defense procurement, and alliance politics were increasingly handled as one bargaining package. Allies were not exempt from economic pressure because they were allies.

At the same time, Europe and Asia have been building connections that would have seemed highly ambitious a decade ago. The European Union signed security and defense partnerships with Japan and South Korea in November 2024. This year, the EU and Japan launched a defense-industry dialogue, while the EU and South Korea signed a digital trade agreement and began implementing cooperation on maritime security, cyber and hybrid threats, information manipulation, space, and the defense industry. The strategic map is becoming more networked. 

The network, however, remains uneven. Japan already has a mature economic partnership with the EU and rapidly expanding defense-industry ties. EU-South Korea relations are deepening, but they still lack the density and regular strategic consultation found in EU-Japan ties. A trilateral format would therefore do more than add another meeting: it would reduce asymmetry among three partners whose capabilities are increasingly complementary.

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South Korea, Japan, and the EU now face four converging challenges and pressures.

The first is demographic. South Korea is aging faster than any other OECD society; Japan’s working-age population has been shrinking for decades; and the EU’s fertility rate reached a new low in 2024. Demography is not a social-policy sidebar. It affects defense recruitment, industrial capacity, fiscal room, technological adoption, and the ability to sustain long-term commitments. Each actor is experimenting with immigration, automation, workforce policy, and welfare reform, but the security implications remain largely compartmentalized.

The second is concentrated economic dependence. None of the three can or should decouple from China. Yet South Korea’s experience after the THAAD deployment, Europe’s debates over economic coercion, and China’s export controls on gallium, germanium, and other strategic inputs have shown that interdependence can be converted into leverage. De-risking therefore requires more than national stockpiles. It requires shared risk maps, compatible certification, co-investment in alternative suppliers, and advance consultation before export controls or industrial subsidies create collateral damage among partners.

The third challenge is U.S. volatility. The United States is still the only actor capable of providing extended nuclear deterrence to South Korea and Japan, and NATO remains central to European defense. But dependence on U.S. power now coexists with uncertainty about U.S. policy. The classic alliance dilemmas of abandonment and entrapment are no longer opposite ends of a spectrum. Today, U.S. allies fear both being left out and being drawn into bargains or contingencies they did not shape.

The fourth pressure is the collapse of the old geographic separation between European and Asian security. North Korean munitions, missiles, and troops have supported Russia’s war against Ukraine. Moscow, in turn, has provided Pyongyang with political cover, economic support, and the prospect of military know-how. What happens on a European battlefield is changing the military balance on the Korean Peninsula. A regional response to a cross-regional threat is structurally inadequate.

This is the case for an EU-Japan-South Korea strategic dialogue. This framework should not be described as strategic autonomy, equidistance, or a hedge against the United States. A better term would be institutionalized hedging: risk diversification through standing, rule-based consultation among allies and partners that remain anchored in the broader U.S.-led system.

The proposal is more feasible than ever before. Japan-South Korea relations have improved significantly in recent years. The January 2026 summit in Nara and the reciprocal summit in South Korea in May demonstrated continuity across leadership changes in both countries since June 2025. The EU already has free-trade, digital, green, and security frameworks with both countries. The task is not to invent three new bilateral relationships; it is to connect existing ones.

The dialogue should begin modestly, through a Track 1.5 process involving officials, experts, and industry. Its early agenda must be concrete and specific: a joint critical minerals and supply chain risk assessment; consultation on export controls and investment screening; cooperation on AI, cyber resilience, and digital standards; exchanges on demographic and defense workforce adaptation; and shared monitoring of North Korea-Russia military cooperation. Successful projects could then be elevated to ministerial working groups.

Two design choices are essential. First, the initiative must remain function-driven. It is not NATO, not the Quad, and not an anti-China coalition. Its purpose is to reduce vulnerability without demanding economic separation. Second, it should be complementary to relations with Washington and transparent about that purpose. Horizontal networks strengthen alliances when they help allies absorb shocks, coordinate positions, and arrive at consultations with greater capacity.

For South Korea, the need is particularly acute. Japan already has the G7, a mature economic partnership with the EU, and expanding European defense ties. Seoul’s international weight has grown faster than its institutional depth. An EU-Japan-South Korea dialogue would help close that gap.

Horizontalizing alliances is not a vote of no confidence in the United States. It is insurance for the moments when the United States wavers, overreaches, or changes course. The postwar hierarchy cannot simply be preserved by demanding more reassurance from Washington. Its resilience will depend on whether allies can build connective tissue among themselves before the next crisis forces them to improvise.

The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes Stanford's top 10% of honors theses in the social sciences, science, and engineering among graduating seniors. Marco’s thesis is entitled, “When Democracy Counts: Testing the Demand-Side Micrologics of Backsliding with Evidence from Indonesia.” It poses the question, do Indonesian citizens fail to punish democratic backsliding at the ballot box? Over more than a decade of democratic decline, Indonesian voters have shown remarkably little alarm, continuing to reward leaders associated with democratic erosion while professing support for democracy. This thesis investigates the demand-side foundations of that puzzle, probing whether the content of democracy might itself be the problem. To pinpoint precisely where and how the accountability chain breaks down, Marco fielded an original nationally-representative survey experiment in February 2026 with Indikator Politik Indonesia (N = 1,566), randomly assigning Indonesian respondents to one of three definitions of democracy — electoral, liberal, or substantive — and tracking their responses across four hypothetical scenarios. To measure treatment comprehension and experimental manipulation, he scored open-ended responses using a novel multi-model LLM coding ensemble. Combined, this empirical design enabled him to discriminate between two candidate diagnoses of conceptual failure: that Indonesian citizens hold conceptions of democracy that simply diverge from those of scholars (the divergent conceptions argument), or that “democracy” itself carries too little evaluative content to differentiate governance failures of different kinds (the thinness argument). Ultimately, the evidence points overwhelmingly in support of the latter interpretation — that for many Indonesian citizens, “democracy” functions less as a thick descriptive concept than as a thin term of approval whose application tracks perceived governance quality. The divergent conceptions hypothesis, meanwhile, yields a robust null across thirteen specifications. In this era of backsliding, the conceptual thinning of “democracy” carries severe implications for the validity of cross-comparative survey research, for the elite strategies that exploit the term’s elasticity, and for the resilience of democracy in Indonesia and beyond.

Shayla’s thesis is entitled “Bound by the Ballot? Autocratic Compliance After Electoral Defeat.” When autocrats lose elections, what determines whether they comply with the electorate's judgment? And if they resist, what determines whether they succeed? Despite the frequency and consequences of autocratic electoral crises, electoral compliance decisions remain undertheorized. To address this gap, Shayla proposes a two-stage theory of incumbent compliance. At Stage 1, pre-election structural conditions — military control, elite unity, and international vulnerability — determine whether resistance is viable. At Stage 2, activated only if resistance occurs, two reactive forces — mass mobilization and activated international pressure — become salient. Drawing on an original dataset of elections held in autocratic regimes between 1970 and 2018, the results partially support and partially challenge this theory. While structural weakness reliably precludes resistance, structural strength does not reliably cause it; among cases where resistance occurs, high, cohesive international pressure emerges as the most consistent determinant of whether incumbents ultimately exit. This thesis posits that compliance is best understood as a process shaped by forces operating at different moments, and that this temporal distinction has both implications for how scholars and international actors understand and respond to electoral crises in electoral autocracies.

Honoring a Legacy of Community Building

Zoe Savellos, a Stanford graduate and member of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Class of 2018, passed away in 2025 at the age of 29. She is remembered by those who knew her as brilliant, generous, and deeply committed to others. To honor her memory and the spirit she brought to the CDDRL community, the center has established the Zoe Savellos Memorial Award for Community Building.

“Zoe’s palpable passion for her thesis research and to make a genuine difference in the world inspired a sense of optimism and confidence in our CDDRL cohort to dream bigger and push through when we didn’t think we could,” shared her friend and classmate Kelsey Page ‘18. “As I struggled toward the thesis deadline, Zoe not only helped me with last-minute formatting questions long after she had completed her own thesis, but also brought me a blazer for my presentation when I forgot one. Zoe enthusiastically counting down the minutes to the completion of my thesis so we could celebrate together is just one example of how she placed shared joy over individual accomplishment — she was everyone's biggest cheerleader.”

Presented annually within CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program, the award will recognize a student selected by their peers for their meaningful contributions to the strength of the honors cohort. The class of 2026 has selected Zoya Fasihuddin, an Economics major also studying Human Rights, as the first recipient of this award.

“I'm so honored, and this is entirely a reflection of the cohort we all got to be a part of, as well as Steve and María’s leadership,” shared Zoya. “While I didn't have the privilege of knowing Zoe, everything that’s been shared about her in terms of her warmth and empathy is exactly the kind of person I aspire to be.”

The cohort experience is central to the Honors Program. Students engage deeply with one another’s work and navigate the challenges of independent research together. The Zoe Savellos Memorial Award for Community Building recognizes the important role students play in shaping that experience and honors the individual whose support, enthusiasm, and community-building spirit help create a more connected and meaningful collective experience.

The Class of 2026

Marco, Shayla, and Zoya are part of a cohort of 12 graduating CDDRL honors students who have spent the past year working in consultation with CDDRL-affiliated faculty members and attending honors research workshops to develop their thesis projects. The theses this year covered topics as wide-ranging as democratic resilience and authoritarian elections, feminist mobilization in Pakistan, Indigenous reunification and identity in Oklahoma, net neutrality and regulatory politics, economic protectionism, collective memory in Spain, and the role of retired military leaders in American elections.

"We could not be prouder of this cohort of seniors in the Fisher Family Honors Program and the theses they produced," shared María Ignacia Curiel, a Research Scholar at CDDRL who co-teaches the Honors Program alongside Stephen Stedman. "Born from a year of scholarly perseverance and camaraderie, these projects genuinely advance our understanding of democracy, development, and the rule of law around the world."

In addition to the Firestone Medal, CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award, and the Zoe Savellos Memorial Award for Community Building, members of the Class of 2026 have received several other honors heading into graduation:

• Anagali Duncan received the 2026 Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award, which recognizes distinctive contributions to undergraduate education and the quality of student life.
• Emma Wang and Marco Widodo are among the newest members elected to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honors society.
• Anagali Duncan, Dani Gonzalez-Gaubecka, Emma Wang, Lila Batcheller, Lorraine Cioffi, and Rachel Owens have all received the Award of Excellence. Designed to recognize the top 10% of the class, this award honors graduating seniors who have demonstrated a sincere commitment to the university through involvement, leadership, and extraordinary Stanford spirit.
   

CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject related to democracy, development, and the rule of law. Honors students participate in research methods workshops, attend Honors College in Washington, D.C., connect to the CDDRL research community, and write their thesis in close consultation with a faculty advisor to graduate with a certificate of honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law.
 

Explore the rest of the thesis topics of the Fisher Family Honors Program Class of 2026 below: