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.

Introduction and Contribution

A burgeoning literature considers the domestic causes and consequences of democratic backsliding for public perceptions of democracy but has yet to fully examine the role of international factors in explaining these perceptions. The effect of democratic backsliding in one

democracy on public support for democratic principles in other countries has, thus far, defied theoretical and empirical investigation. In “U.S. Democratic Backsliding and the Decline of Democratic Support Abroad,” Amnon Cavari, Amichai Magen, and Benjamin Yoel address this gap in knowledge. They propose and test a theory of the effects of backsliding on global opinion, in which information about democratic decline in one country can lead to diminished support for liberal democracy and increased support for authoritarian governance in another. To test this, they deployed an original survey experiment in Israel to examine the effect of two narratives about the 2020 U.S. elections — one signaling democratic decline and one signaling democratic resilience — on support for authoritarian governance. They found that respondents exposed to the narrative of U.S. democratic decline were more supportive of authoritarian governance than those exposed to the narrative of democratic resilience. Moreover, they find marginal evidence that the respondents’ ideological preferences condition the effect of narrative exposure. Cavari, Magen, and Yoel’s findings suggest that the democratic backsliding literature has insufficiently explored the global consequences of domestic events and processes for democratic decline worldwide.

Democratic erosion is both a supply- and demand-side phenomenon. On the supply side, leaders take anti-democratic actions, such as weakening checks on executive power, which they then justify to the public — on grounds of law and order, threats to the nation, and so on. On the demand side, varied types of social conflict, such as polarization or racial animus, can lead publics to endorse limits on democratic governance. 

Real-life models of democratic erosion have ‘diffused’ across borders. For example, strongmen in countries neighboring Russia, such as Alexander Lukashenko and Viktor Orbán, have borrowed from Vladimir Putin’s playbook of jailing opponents and using anti-Western rhetoric. It is less clear, however, whether authoritarian phenomena in one country can prompt changes in the beliefs of ordinary people in other countries.

In “U.S. Democratic Backsliding and the Decline of Democratic Support Abroad,” Amnon Cavari, Amichai Magen, and Benjamin Yoel present results from a survey experiment conducted among Israelis following the January 6 United States Capitol attack. They find that respondents who were randomly exposed to a narrative about US democracy eroding were significantly more supportive of autocracy in Israel. By contrast, those exposed to a narrative about the resilience of US democracy after January 6 were less supportive. These effects were most pronounced among conservative Israelis, perhaps unsurprising given the associations between right-wing ideologies and authoritarianism.

Readers come away with a sense of the varied ways that democratic erosion can diffuse across borders, particularly at the micro level. That changes in American politics can affect the attitudes of Israelis over 6000 miles away suggests that autocrats can be highly effective in shaping the regime trajectories of their more immediate neighbors. This makes it all the more urgent to combat anti-democratic narratives before they take root and spread.

How Authoritarian Attitudes Diffuse

The authors make a straightforward claim: someone in country A who observes democratic norms or institutions being undermined in country B may well question the value of democracy for A. To see this, consider how Nayib Bukele’s campaign of mass imprisonment without due process in El Salvador has appealed to ordinary people across Latin America. In light of the social and economic problems facing democratic countries, unchecked strongmen — and their purported successes — have come to seem more credible and pragmatic. 

Democratic erosion in country B should be especially likely to affect the beliefs of people in A when (1) B is a close ally of, or is seen as powerful or influential for A, and (2) events in B are widely covered in A’s traditional or social media. For example, coverage of the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” was shown to influence how people in other European Union countries viewed integration or withdrawal. The authors further posit that democratic erosion will have a larger effect on support for autocracy among those who subscribe to right-wing ideologies — these prioritize social order and religious or racial purity, which can conflict with inclusive democracy. 

Backsliding in Israel and Ties to the United States

Israeli democracy has eroded in recent years, particularly as Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has worked to undermine judicial independence and as discrimination against Arab and other ethnic minority Israelis persists. However, Israel’s backsliding also has strong demand-side components: majorities of those surveyed in 2023 agreed that a strong leader — one not limited by the legislature or judiciary — was necessary to solve Israel’s problems, that voting rights should be restricted among those unwilling to declare their loyalty to the state, and that international NGOs should be banned. The authors aim to show that these anti-democratic beliefs stem not only from elite rhetoric or national polarization, but from global backsliding. 

The United States is Israel’s closest ally, and the two countries share much in terms of political and social life. Both were founded by groups fleeing persecution, who established a political culture defined by pioneer settlement and the displacement of indigenous peoples. The US has consistently supported Israel’s wars and military operations in the Middle East. A large majority of Israelis view the US as an exemplar of democracy and freedom. This makes Israel an ideal case for measuring how global democratic erosion affects democratic sentiment at home. 

The Survey Experiment

The survey was fielded in March 2021, a time of acute political crisis in Israel: this marked the fourth election cycle in less than two years, and the prior two elections had resulted in parliamentary stalemates and short-lived governments. In the prior months, Israeli media had extensively covered Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 elections and ensuing January 6 attack on the Capitol. 92% of survey participants reported following the US elections, and 43% reported doing so closely. A majority reported believing the US strongly influences Israeli politics.

Participants were randomly assigned to read one of two ‘vignettes’ about the 2020 elections. One emphasized that US democracy had faltered, as evidenced by Trump’s behavior and the Capitol attack. Another emphasized the resilience of US democracy, as evidenced by high turnout and the eventual transfer of power — this vignette did not mention January 6. The authors find that those who read the “US democracy faltering” vignette were significantly less likely to agree the US elections were free and fair. 

Finally, the authors measure their dependent variable — support for autocracy — in terms of support for restricting speech that is hostile to the government, the permissibility of rule by strongmen, and so on. The key finding is that Israelis exposed to the “US democracy faltering” narrative were significantly more supportive of autocracy.
 

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Figure 3. Support for Authoritative Governance, by Vignette.
 

These effects were most pronounced among those on the political right, but the main finding holds even when statistically controlling for ideology. In all, the study demonstrates that when democratic erosion diffuses, it can shape not only elite behavior but mass attitudes as well.
 

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Figure 4. Effect of ideology on support for Authoritative Governance by Vignette.
 

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Introduction and Contribution

Since coming to power in 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have significantly undermined Turkish democracy. This has most visibly involved police repression, systematic prosecutions of the AKP’s critics, and partisan control and censorship of the media. Although opposition persisted in parliament, municipalities, campuses, and professional associations, the playing field is rigged against the AKP’s opponents.

Yet these visible forms of repression are only part of a broader process of Turkey’s autocratization. In “The Capture of Turkey’s Universities Under the AKP,” Ayça Alemdaroğlu shows how the regime has, through a host of less spectacular but durable mechanisms, used its control over higher education to turn universities into channels for distributing opportunity, disciplining dissent, and cultivating loyal staff and students. These mechanisms — including baseless investigations and dismissals of academics, online citizen reporting against faculty, and patronage around university jobs — have weakened academic life and transformed Turkish higher education into a key instrument of the AKP’s governing project.

Importantly, Turkey’s democratic erosion has accelerated in tandem with the massive, rapid growth in colleges and student enrollment. For Alemdaroğlu, this should temper any assumption that higher education is automatically a space of democratic resistance. Universities can produce critique, organization, and dissent, but the higher education system can also facilitate authoritarian consolidation through appointments, disciplinary procedures, funding, surveillance, and patronage. Comparable processes to subordinate universities have unfolded in India, China, and Russia. Instructors may publish or teach critical material while students may organize against the state, but autocrats can hedge against these risks by capturing the university system writ large. In the United States, where universities have become central to “culture wars,” Alemdaroğlu’s article serves as a cautionary tale about how quickly institutional autonomy can erode, especially in the absence of protections against executive encroachment.

The Growth of Turkish Higher Education

The AKP did not eviscerate higher education in one fell swoop but did so incrementally, building on the efforts of its predecessors. For example, after the 1980 coup d'état, Turkey’s military government centralized key aspects of university appointments, which the Erdoğan regime has expanded. In addition, the country’s 1980s neoliberal turn refashioned universities as instruments of profit and efficiency rather than spaces of academic freedom. Since the AKP attained power, higher education has grown at an unprecedented scale: there were 76 universities with 1.7 million enrolled students in 2002, compared to 206 universities and 8 million students in 2020. This has afforded the regime vast new terrain on which to exercise control.

Unsurprisingly, such rapid growth has increased quantity at the expense of quality. From a political standpoint, however, this is not especially costly for the AKP. For example, meager investments in research capacity have served to weaken the independence of academics and their ability to criticize the regime. Meanwhile, university hiring processes reflect the preferences of AKP loyalists, thus expanding the scope of co-optation. These are not unintended consequences but core features of a system geared toward patronage.

University expansion has helped the AKP widen its reach across social groups and economic sectors. Lucrative construction projects, public-sector jobs, faculty appointments and access to scarce resources have become channels through which the party awards supporters and cultivates loyalty.  In other words, higher education has served as a means of patronage, ideological inculcation and political control. The government framed expansion as a democratizing challenge to secular urban privilege and as part of a project to cultivate a more conservative, religiously grounded youth.

Waves of Capture

Alemdaroğlu periodizes the AKP’s higher education agenda into three waves that illustrate the shift from episodic intervention to routinized control. The first wave, which began soon after the AKP came to power, was not immediately visible to international observers as part of a broader authoritarian turn. Though it was clear to those targeted. For example, a 2005 penal code criminalized the “denigration of Turkishness,” which state prosecutors used to target faculty in literature and journalism, particularly those who had published on the Armenian genocide and the systematic mistreatment of Kurds.

By contrast, the second wave, beginning after the failed 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt, was much more dramatic. The AKP government presented the coup attempt, which it attributed to the Gülen movement, as a national emergency requiring sweeping state action. Faculty and employees were dismissed and suspended en masse, while Gülen-affiliated universities were shuttered and had their assets frozen. In addition, investigations were conducted against those who signed a 2016 “Academics for Peace” document, which called for an end to state violence against Kurds. Turkey’s Constitutional Court found the investigations illegal in 2019, but by which time many academics had already lost their positions, passports, income, and professional standing.

The final, ongoing wave has “shifted toward a permanent institutional model, moving control and coercion into the everyday governance of the university.” Faculty are routinely disciplined for “verbally disrespectful speech” or conduct incompatible with “public morality and decency,” while AKP loyalists are appointed to senior academic posts by direct presidential decree. In addition, online citizen reporting through the state’s communication system has created another channel for targeting faculty. Although the rise from 130,000 applications in 2006 to 6 million in 2020 reflects the system as a whole, it shows how citizen complaints became part of everyday state monitoring, including at universities.

Ultimately, the Turkey case shows how democracy erodes through both dramatic ruptures and quiet, cumulative transformations. Alemdaroğlu emphasizes that the degraded condition of Turkish higher education does not merely reflect AKP’s autocratization but has actively enabled it.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Introduction and Contribution

Democracies face a host of ongoing challenges, including the rise of elected autocrats, income inequality, mainstreamed forms of xenophobic nationalism, and political apathy. All of these challenges pose threats to democratic participation — elected autocrats restrict it, inequality makes it easier for oligarchs to sway election outcomes, and xenophobia can discourage cultural outsiders from voting.

Apart from practical threats to democratic participation, an established intellectual tradition has viewed participation with deep skepticism. In this view, democracy is good simply because it ensures peaceful transfers of power and protects individual rights. Collective decisions, however, cannot be meaningfully viewed as representing the “will of the people” owing to manipulation, apathy, and the high costs of acquiring political knowledge. Is this “realist” vision the best one can hope for in democratic life?

In “Can deliberation have lasting effects?,” James Fishkin, Valentin Bolotnyy, Joshua Lerner, Alice Siu, and Norman Bradburn show how a three-day deliberative experiment in late 2019 had large and long-term effects on turnout and voting behavior. Those most likely to exhibit these civic behaviors nearly a year later had come to follow politics more closely and see their political opinions as valuable. At the same time, the experiment’s effects on participants’ policy views were significant only in the short term — most deliberators eventually reverted to their previously held policy positions.

That three days of deliberation had such lasting civic effects suggests that efforts to create more inclusive forms of democratic participation are both possible and scalable. Moreover, it suggests that academic skepticism about democratic participation is not an argument against citizens’ capacities for reasonable decision-making; rather, it is an argument against our imperfect contexts of participation. Deliberative experiments may offer hope for improving these contexts.

The Deliberative Experiment and Its Effects on Policy Views

In September 2019 — one week prior to the experiment — a treatment group (i.e., those who would deliberate) of 523 registered voters from around the US and a control group of 844 voters were surveyed on their political attitudes. Members of the treatment group then deliberated on five issue domains (the economy, environment, immigration, health care, foreign policy) in small groups and on 47 policy proposals (e.g., redistributing wealth in some way). 26 of these proposals were characterized by extreme partisan polarization, meaning significant numbers of those who identified as Democrats or Republicans held the most extreme views. After the deliberations ended, both the treatment and control groups were surveyed. Then, three subsequent surveys were conducted in late 2020.

Among the treatment group, deliberation produced significant, short-term depolarization on 20 of the 26 (polarized) policy proposals. In other words, the averages for participants who identified with each party moved closer together (though not necessarily toward the center). These changes were large, sometimes 40 percentage points, as in the case of Republicans abandoning extreme positions on immigration. Meanwhile, the control group’s policy positions changed hardly at all — pointing to the key role played by deliberation. Within the five issue areas, averages among deliberators shifted leftward on all but the economy.
 

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Figure 1. Policy-Based Score (PBS) Changes over Time
Note: Policy-based score (PBS) is constructed for each individual based on responses to 26 questions identified as the most polarizing. The upper chart shows the participant group, and the lower chart shows the control group. T1 is the survey wave prior to the deliberations, T2 is right after the deliberations, and T3 is 10 months after, in July 2020.
 

By late 2020, however, the treatment group’s policy positions mostly reverted to their pre-deliberation levels. The differences between these two points in time were still significant compared with the control group, yet relatively small in absolute terms. These policy reversions are perhaps unsurprising: deliberators returned to an environment of heightened polarization and aggressive campaigning during the 2020 election cycle. (To be sure, and from the standpoint of finding solutions to collective problems, policy reversion is not especially concerning — the aim of deliberation is to bring citizens together to reason and compromise, which the experiment accomplished.)

A Civic Awakening?

The lack of long-term policy effects suggests that three-day deliberations may be limited in their ability to create a more encompassing, participatory society. However, the treatment group demonstrated large and persistent changes in their intention to vote (i.e., turnout) and their candidate of choice. Among the control group, Joe Biden was favored over Donald Trump by about four percentage points — very close to Biden’s actual margin in the popular vote. Among the treatment group, however, Biden was favored by 28 percentage points. The gaps in turnout were similarly large. (Note that these are intentions, not reports of actual decisions. However, Tables 6 and 7 in the article show similar effects for recollected votes after the election.)
 

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Table 2. Voting Intention for Participant and Control Groups, Time 4
 

These civic outcomes are especially surprising because (a) voting behavior is thought to be stable and deeply rooted in one’s psychology and social context, and (b) experimental efforts to increase turnout have been most successful when undertaken shortly before elections, as opposed to one whole year prior. The effects were most pronounced among political moderates and those without college degrees — perhaps pointing to the educative effects of deliberation.
 

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Figure 5. Effects on Vote Intention Captured by Predictive Modeling, by Education
Note: Middle are those participants who have Policy-Based Scores between 3 and 5 (inclusive) at Time 1. Non-middle participants are all other participants. Positive prediction error shows that, on average, participants were more likely to vote for Biden than predicted by the model. Vote intention data are collected at Time 4, in October, 2020. Full calibrated model used to construct this figure can be found in the APSR Dataverse.
 

Why did deliberation produce only short-term policy effects but long-term effects on voting behavior? The authors posit that deliberation caused an “awakening of civic capacities.” They reason that deliberation was a transformative experience in terms of stimulating political engagement and a sense of efficacy. And indeed, the treatment group was, in the long term, more likely than the control group to follow the 2020 election campaign, believe their political opinions mattered, and acquire general information about American politics. (The latter is measured in terms of knowing which party controlled the House and Senate.)
 

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Figure 9. Having “Political Opinions Worth Listening to”
Note: Policy-based score is constructed for each individual based on responses to 26 questions identified as the most polarizing. Responses to the question “How strongly would you disagree or agree with the following statement?”[I have opinions about politics that are worth listening to.] were collected at T1 (just before deliberations), T2 (just after), and T3 (10 months later, July 2020).
 

The authors close by discussing efforts to scale up civic engagement, such as the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform. In all, “Can deliberation have lasting effects?” provides a rigorous case for the value of deliberation in strengthening democratic participation.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.