Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to invite nominations for the 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award, which carries a cash prize of US$10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists and news media outlets for excellence in covering the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2026 award will honor a Western news media outlet or a journalist whose substantial body of work has primarily appeared in Western news media. APARC welcomes award nomination submissions from news editors, publishers, scholars, news outlets, journalism organizations, and entities focused on researching and analyzing the Asia-Pacific region. Entries are due by February 15, 2026.

The award defines the Asia-Pacific region broadly as including Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Australasia. Both individual journalists with a considerable body of work and news media outlets are eligible for the award. Nominees’ work may be in traditional forms of print or broadcast journalism and/or in new forms of multimedia journalism. The Award Selection Committee oversees the judging of nominees and is responsible for selecting honorees.

An annual tradition since 2002, the award honors the legacy of Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, APARC's benefactor, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. Throughout its history, the award has recognized world-class journalists and news media who push the boundaries of coverage of the Asia-Pacific region and champion press freedom and human rights.

Recent honorees include Netra News, Bangladesh's premier public interest journalism outlet; Chris Buckley, the New York Times' chief China correspondent; The Caravan, India’s esteemed magazine of long-form journalism; Emily Feng, then NPR's Beijing correspondent; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, CEO and president of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler. Visit the award page to learn more.

Award nominations are accepted electronically through Sunday, February 15, 2026, at 11:59 PM PST.  Visit the award nomination entry page for information about the nomination procedures and to submit an entry.

APARC will announce the winner by May 2026.

Please direct all inquiries to aparc-communications@stanford.edu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On October 21, 2025, Ms. Sanae Takaichi, a hardline conservative, became the first female Prime Minister of Japan, marking a historic moment for the country, which has one of the worst records among the world's developed democracies for gender equality. Yet, Takaichi's views on empowering women are complex, and she steps into office at a moment of internal party weakness and intense domestic and regional strategic pressures. On October 28, she will welcome President Trump to Tokyo, where the two leaders will hold a summit meeting.

In the following video explainer, Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the director of APARC and its Japan Program, discusses Takaichi’s background and rise to power, her cabinet choices, and what they signal for Japan's future. Watch:

Video: Michael Breger

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In the Media

On October 28, 2025, on the heels of the summit meeting of Prime Minister Takaichi and President Trump, Tsutsui joined Scott Tong, host of WBUR's Here & Now, to discuss Takaichi's rise to power and what's next for Japan. Listen:

Motivation

Political parties have long reflected  dividing lines between groups in a society, often called political ‘cleavages’. Examples include workers vs. business owners, Protestants vs. Catholics, and urban vs. rural constituents. Civil society organizations (CSOs) — such as unions, churches, and chambers of commerce — have historically shaped the content and strength of these cleavages.

However, both CSOs and cleavages have changed in recent decades. For one, traditional cleavages have declined in importance, and new divides have emerged, such as between the so-called winners and losers of globalization or between those on one side or the other of the culture wars. In addition, formal CSOs have seen declining membership and reduced political influence, while informal groups and more episodic activism have grown. While CSOs and political parties used to have highly formalized relationships, they now tend to engage with each other more opportunistically and sometimes antagonistically. It seems clear that CSOs continue to influence political cleavages — both old and new — in the 21st century. But how exactly does this occur?

Contribution

In “Cleavage Theory Meets Civil Society,” Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki, Endre Borbáth, and Swen Hutter examine the varied historical and contemporary relationships between CSOs, cleavages, and political parties in Western Europe. The authors develop a general framework for understanding the relationship between CSOs and cleavage development, providing insights into how contemporary politics reflects long-term changes in the structure of civil society. 

The paper is set against social science research on cleavages, which can be divided into two broad streams. First, classical scholarship emphasized the importance of early 20th-century mass associations, such as unions, in shaping cleavages and party politics. By contrast, newer work, written against the backdrop of a changing CSO landscape, has viewed CSOs as largely irrelevant, arguing that opposition parties shape cleavages via direct interactions with voters. Neither body of previous work provides a compelling framework for understanding how contemporary CSOs — given their fragmentation, informationalization, and politicization -- matter for cleavages.

The authors also shed light on the phenomenon of polarization, which is a key part of democratic backsliding. Indeed, electorates are polarized around several cleavages — economic, religious, and cultural — that populist leaders have used to justify excluding their opponents from politics, portraying them as existential threats to a specific way of life.

Processes and Mechanisms

The authors suggest that cleavage development can be seen as the culmination of three processes, which CSOs may influence in key ways. The first is “group formation,” which concerns how individuals come to identify as workers, congregants, or otherwise. The second process is “political institutionalization,” which entails cleavages being embodied in party competition. The third is “political stabilization,” whereby cleavages are reinforced over time by parties.
 

Table 1. Role of civil society across stages of cleavage development.
 

To understand how CSOs might shape these three processes, the authors outline two mechanisms. The first is “linkage,” whereby CSOs communicate group demands and pressure political parties to represent them. Linkage is hypothesized to be more important during the latter processes of institutionalization and stabilization; it was historically important in group formation but less so today because of the aforementioned decline of formal CSOs.

The second mechanism is “social closure,” which concerns how group boundaries are solidified. CSOs are hypothesized to contribute to social closure by bringing group members together and organizing them around shared demands, increasing their sense of ingroup identification. This mechanism is important for group formation as well as  political stabilization.

CSOs still appear to facilitate linkage and social closure, albeit in different ways than in the early 20th century. For example, CSOs are less likely to have formal links to parties but continue to exert pressure by organizing around individual issues, candidates, and elections. Voters’ relationships to CSOs are also more varied, creating divisions within the electorate between highly-active individuals who have a strong sense of group identity and people who are less ‘anchored’ to the cleavage. The authors also hypothesize that some of these dynamics may produce asymmetric changes across the left and right, as the strength and tactics of CSOs vary.
 

Table 2. Implications of the changing structure of civil society.
 

Cross-National and Case Study Evidence

The authors then analyze cross-national data on political parties and voters in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. One data source concerns the extent to which political parties are tied to CSOs and whether they receive large-scale CSO donations. A second source looks at whether party supporters are active in CSOs. Preliminary findings point to important differences between old, class-based parties (especially Social Democrats) and newer parties, with the latter much less tied to CSOs. However, within the new party families, Green parties are more tightly linked to CSOs than far-right parties, but there also exists variation within far-right parties. These patterns demand a more fine-grained analysis of specific cases.
 

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Figure 2. Members of civil society organizations among the electorate of political parties in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Note: The figure is based on the Joint EVS/WVS 2017-2022 Dataset (2022). It uses the battery of membership in organizations and partisanship questions. In the WVS, partisanship is measured with ‘Which party would you vote for?’; in the EVS, with ‘Which political party appeals to you most?’ For this figure, the two items are treated as functional equivalents. The percentage of members is calculated from all respondents indicating sympathy towards the respective party.
 

Finally, the authors qualitatively analyze three distinct cases: one New Left party and both old and new far-right populist parties — the German Green Party, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Their analysis reveals key differences as regards the importance of CSOs in fostering linkage and social closure. CSOs played a key role in consolidating the Greens and SVP, whereas in the case of AfD, antipathy from German CSOs helped generate a more outsider identity.

The Greens emerged via linkages with left-libertarian social movements in the 1970s and 80s. This included groups supportive of environmental protection and feminism and opposed to nuclear proliferation. CSOs provided ideas and personnel, which helped build a sense of social closure among party supporters. This identity still persists in spite of the subsequent fragmentation of civil society.

By contrast, SVP emerged through connections to Swiss farmers' associations, rural economic networks, and local interest groups. SVP has been radicalizing since the 1990s, becoming one of Europe’s most successful far-right parties and aligning itself with Euroscepticism. SVP’s long history of rural and community penetration has helped strengthen social closure among its electorate.

Finally, AfD emerged in a more fragmented context, via its ties to right-wing protest networks. The party was a top-down vehicle that organized in response to what it saw as Germany’s mismanagement of the Eurozone crisis. AfD lacks dense connections to CSOs and has instead built informal and often volatile alliances with protesters. Many German CSOs — as well as German society more generally — explicitly oppose AfD, which has ironically helped AfD build an outsider identity because its supporters feel isolated and stigmatized.

The case studies vividly illustrate how varied CSO relationships shape cleavages and partisanship in three of the most important Western European parties.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Motivation and Summary

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.

Argument and Hypotheses

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.

Methods and Findings

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.
 

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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.
 

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Figure 4: Quality at varying levels of capacity.
 

Contributions and Implications

“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.