This episode explores the main differences between contemporary, quasi-dictatorial regimes based on spin, and older 20th-century dictatorships based on overt repression and fear. Why do spin dictators demonstrate a commitment to democratic elections and how do their actions undermine democracy from within? Listen to find out what such regimes teach us about internal contradictions of Western democracies and how similar spin dictators are to so-called populist leaders.
Guests featured in this episode:
Sergei Guriev, Provost of Sciences Po in Paris. He's professor of economics there following an outstanding academic career at the New Economic School in Moscow. He was its Rector until 2013 when he was forced by political circumstances to leave Russia. Between 2016 and 2019, Sergei served as the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. And he has held visiting professorships at MIT, Princeton. And in 2006, he was selected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
His very broad research interests span various areas of political economics, developmental economics, labor mobility, corporate governance and contract theory. And besides numerous academic publications, he also writes for "The New York Times," "Financial Times," "Washington Post," and "Project Syndicate." His latest book, "Spin Dictators," written together with Daniel Treisman, is a fascinating account of the changing character of authoritarian politics.
Glossary
What is China’s “zero-COVID” policy?
(23:25 or p.6 in the transcript)
COVID-19, a highly contagious respiratory illness, was first detected in Wuhan, China, in 2019 and rapidly spread throughout the country and the world, giving rise to a multiyear pandemic that resulted in millions of deaths worldwide. In efforts to keep the disease from spreading, China implemented strict “zero-COVID” policies aimed at keeping the number of cases as close to zero as possible through measures including strict lockdowns, quarantines, and mass testing. As a result, infection cases and deaths were relatively lower in China compared with other wealthy countries. Despite residents’ initial support of government policies and China’s early success in containing the spread of the disease, many grew frustrated as the restrictions became harsher and longer due to an increased number of cases resulting from highly transmissible variants. Repeated lockdowns and testing disrupted residents’ daily life and travel across the country. Some parts of China, such as Yining and Guiyang, experienced shortages of food and other essential items. The zero-COVID policies were eased in December 2022 following a rare protest by thousands of Chinese residents demanding that the government end the harsh policies, some even calling for the resignation of Xi Jinping. source
What was the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea?
(25:10 or p.7 in the transcript)
Almost immediately after the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine ended, armed men began occupying key facilities and checkpoints on the Crimean Peninsula. They wore Russian combat fatigues but with no identifying insignia. President Vladimir Putin at first flatly denied these were Russian soldiers, only to later admit that they were and award commendations to their commanders. The sizeable Ukrainian military presence in Crimea stayed in garrison. If shooting began, Kyiv wanted the world to see the Russians fire first. Ukraine’s Western partners urged Kyiv not to take precipitate action. Since many enlisted personnel in the Ukrainian ranks came from Crimea, Ukrainian commanders probably had less than full confidence in the reliability of their troops. By early March, Russian troops had secured the entire peninsula. On March 6, the Crimean Supreme Council voted to ask to accede to Russia. The council scheduled a referendum for March 16, which offered two choices: join Russia or return to Crimea’s 1992 constitution, which gave the peninsula significant autonomy. Those who favoured Crimea remaining part of Ukraine under the current constitution had no box to check. The conduct of the referendum proved chaotic and took place absent any credible international observers. Local authorities reported a turnout of 83 percent, with 96.7 percent voting to join Russia. The numbers seemed implausible, given that ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars accounted for almost 40 percent of the peninsula’s population. (Two months later, a leaked report from the Russian president’s Human Rights Council put turnout at only 30 percent, with about half of those voting to join Russia.) On March 18, Crimean and Russian officials signed the Treaty of Accession of the Republic of Crimea to Russia. Putin ratified the treaty three days later. source
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the sixth episode of season six of "Democracy in Question," and I'm really pleased to welcome Sergei Guriev, who is Provost of Sciences Po in Paris. He's professor of economics there following an outstanding academic career at the New Economic School in Moscow. He was its Rector until 2013 when he was forced by political circumstances to leave Russia. Between 2016 and 2019, Sergei served as the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. And he has held visiting professorships at MIT, Princeton. And in 2006, he was selected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
His very broad research interests span various areas of political economics, developmental economics, labor mobility, corporate governance and contract theory. And besides numerous academic publications, he also writes for "The New York Times," "Financial Times," "Washington Post," and "Project Syndicate." His latest book, "Spin Dictators," written together with Daniel Treisman, is a fascinating account of the changing character of authoritarian politics, what I have called soft authoritarian politics, in the 21st century. These are pseudo-democratic, illiberal regimes which exert formidable influence over electorates through psychological manipulation, also selective repression of dissent, media control and propaganda. In short, the book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand better the world in which we live today.
My conversation with Sergei will focus on some of the key issues that his book raises. What are the main differences between contemporary, quasi-dictatorial regimes based on spin and older 20th-century dictatorships based on overt repression and fear? Why do spin dictators feel the need to demonstrate just a strong commitment to democratic elections? How does their artful imitation undermine democracy from within? And what does it teach us about the internal contradictions of actually existing Western democracies? How important is economic success to legitimize the rule of spin dictators? And how similar are spin dictators to so-called populist leaders? Finally, what does the rise of China or the return of Russia to older dictatorial patterns imply for the future of spin dictatorships? These are some of the questions that I wish to discuss with Sergei today. Welcome to the podcast, Sergei. Thanks so much for joining me today. And I really look forward to talking about your book.
Sergei Guriev (SG): Thank you very much, Shalini, for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be on your podcast.
SR: Let us begin with one of the major arguments in "Spin Dictators," which sets itself the ambitious task of providing a detailed anatomy of what you call the changing face of tyranny in the 21st century. This is a transformation that we can only adequately understand in a historical context. And that's why you make a very interesting contrast of comparisons. You contrast today's spin dictators with the older vanishing species of fear dictators, as you call them. Fear dictators used to rely on projecting fear through terror, violence, repression, totalitarian control. And they punctured the illusion of what we may call with Norbert Elias, a linear civilizing process by staging and performing violence in modern mass spectacle of surveillance, repression, intimidating populations into submission eradicating any resistance or even criticism. Of course, they also spurned Western parliamentary democracy and pluralist politics.
Towards the end of the 20th century, you argue that this model became obsolete, and has been largely superseded by a new form of strongman rule based on manipulating and also reshaping the beliefs of citizens. These are what you call spin dictators, who cultivate subtle but effective, interestingly also in your view, hegemonic consent among the governed populations. And they do so by imitating the appearance of democracy. Could you outline this theory of both the historical sequence of dictatorial metamorphosis, if I may call it that, and explain what the main differences are in your view between these two ideal types?
SG: Thank you very much, Shalini, for having read the book and having summarized it so well. This book is for general audience, but it's based on academic quantitative research, which we cite in the book. And we've also put the data, graphs and tables, and replication codes on the special website, spindictators.com, where we show that there is indeed, quantitative evidence that regimes that dominated non-democratic world in the 20th century are now a minority. So, indeed, the main difference between fear dictators and spin dictators is fear dictators are openly using repression. Spin dictators, as you rightly indicated, pretend to be democratic regimes. And that's a very important difference. And the question is, why? The answer for that is democracy is the only game in town.
Overall, the idea is that since 30 years ago, it's very hard to say we love repression. Because we've seen that democracy, even in non-democratic countries, is perceived as the right model of governance. The other thing is the ability of modern leaders to rely on globalization. There is a big difference between how economic performance works today and how it worked in the 1930s. Even then, Stalin's industrialization actually used American technology, American engineers, American capital because without that, Stalin would not be able to build the Soviet industrial machine. But today, if you want economic growth, if you want popularity, you want to be part of the globalized world. You don't want to be a North Korea, you want to be modern Hungary, which is a member of European Union. You want to be Turkey, which has a very deep customs union with Europe. If you look at pictures of modern dictators, the majority of them would wear business suits and travel to Davos to shake hands with democratic leaders and business leaders, so that these business leaders can invest in their countries, bring capital, technology, and jobs so economic growth continues and makes those people popular. And so that is the difference.
We live in a very different world today than we lived before. The trends I'm talking about - globalization, technological progress, emergence of human rights, NGOs, emergence of globalized, cross-border media, social media - all of that has been secular trends. Social media, you can say really took off in the last 10 years, but overall that's been a long-term trend. But one watershed moment was the fall of Berlin Wall and the disintegration of Soviet Union, when it was clear, as Frank Fukuyama put it, the end of history. Democracy won against the competitors. And as we show in the book, people around the world prefer to live in democratic countries. And so, yes, some democrats are proudly illiberal, but they still call themselves democrats because calling yourself a despot is not popular with your public and is not popular with the global business community and the overall world of your potential international partners.
SR: The argument you're making is that they must maintain democratic decorum, both for a national public and for an international constituency, especially the business constituency, which means they need to contain opposition but still tolerate it in some fashion, they need ritually free elections. So, the question here for me is, some of them even start out as democratic political leaders, and then they transition gradually into various degrees of authoritarian rule. Now, from the perspective of the group of people, citizens whom you call the uninformed, manipulated majority of domestic electorates, there is, in a sense, little to distinguish a spin dictator probably then from a genuine, democratic leader. And you mentioned many tricks that they deploy, which are not uniquely specific to spin dictators because they are being used in democratic politics as well. In fact, they originated in many a Western democracy. So, there seems to be some porosity between the actually existing democracy and spin dictatorships. So, my question to you here would be, do you think all democracies are somehow inherently prone to some of the tendencies and perversions that you detect in this spin dictatorial direction? So is there a higher risk somehow of democratic dismantling from the inside now that autocrats are learning to imitate democracy rather than oppose it?
SG: I think, Shalini you're right, whenever we have a socioeconomic problem, or any other problem, since democracy has prevailed over the last decades and became the most popular form of government, we don't have an external enemy. Now in Europe we do, this is Russia. Americans would say, "We have a challenger like China." But overall, this is not comparable to the existential challenge of the Cold War. When the West, the democracies, had an external enemy, they had to unite themselves, within all democratic countries, to stand up to this existential challenge. You can say we also had the war on terror, but the war on terror has never been an existential challenge to the Western world. It was dangerous, deadly, but it was not the same as the Cold War.
Now, when you don't have an external enemy, like in 1940s, you try to think whether we can live better. And sometimes Western elites, democratic elites fail. And as a scholar of populism, I can tell you that one of the things which really mattered for the rise of populism was incompetent management of the global financial crisis, for example. And that created a fertile ground for populist entrants. And some of them were more talented than others, some of them actually managed to dismantle democratic checks and balances, and became, as you rightly said, spin dictators. Some of them wanted to do that but they managed to do this, and democratic institutions stood up to this test. And so, in that sense, yes, there are always attempts, but it doesn't really mean that every democracy is ultimately vulnerable. I think there are many democratic leaders who want to become non-democratic leaders. And I think here, you and I are very well aware of what we scholars can do. We can actually call those leaders, aspiring spin dictators, and tell them, "Look, we will warn our co-citizens, compatriots that you're going into a very, very dangerous direction."
SR: One of the points you made at the beginning is that the spin dictators present themselves as successful economic managers of economic growth, economic performance. And so, they are something of a mix between a celebratory influencer, because they are on social media in a very big way, and a business genius. They claim, if you like, credit for economic growth, and they displace all responsibility for any economic problems onto imaginary or real enemies abroad or within the country. So, a great deal of their energy, their resources are spent on even often a show of economic performance. In the Chinese case, there is economic performance but in the case of many countries, there is also just a show of economic performance. And Russia may be a good example here of material well-being not really resulting in any sustainable way from this kind of pattern of rule. But the question that I have for you is, in a case like China, and you may want to contrast that with Russia, once people become attached to the economic success of these regimes, if they do have a limited or long-term success, is it then increasingly difficult to break the spell of these regimes so that people may be willing to trade democratic freedoms for the comfort of economic prosperity?
SG: This is a great question. And before answering the question about China, I would like to confirm that in our quantitative research on popularity of non-democratic leaders, we used the global data set, Gallup World Poll. Gallup polls are not conducted in China, but they're conducted in many spin dictatorships around the world. So, what we saw was indeed, that economic performance was actually a very important correlate of approval of non-democratic leadership. So, we know that if you have high unemployment in a democratic country, it's hard to win an election. But actually, in non-democratic countries, citizens also are unhappy if the country is going in the wrong way in the sense of economic performance. Now, there is a twist there. We also looked at, not just objective economic performance like GDP growth, or unemployment, or inflation, we also looked at the subjective part of that, when we looked at people who self-report their economic satisfaction. And we saw that some spin dictators indeed, get approval because they do well objectively, but some just use information manipulation, as you've indicated, to get additional approval by convincing their public, their citizens that the economy is doing reasonably well even if it doesn't do well. And this is the genius of spin dictators, they actually use the control of information to pretend to be competent, even if they're not competent economic leaders. And the most important trick, which we talk about, is that they use censorship in a hidden way. So they also censor information about censorship. So, people who live in those countries do not fully understand that information they're getting is biased. Now, that is a strategy that I'm sure many democratic leaders would love to use, but before you actually suppress freedom of speech and control information battleground, it's hard to do in a spin dictatorial way.
Now, coming back to the question of China, first and foremost, we don't know what Chinese people think. We have not seen elections in China at the national level. We saw an experiment with local-level elections, and this experiment was, more or less, ended for good reasons. People voted against corruption. There is also research on this. People voted for local public goods. And people didn't really support national priorities and national public goods, and so Chinese leaders in Beijing decided that that's a bad experiment. We don't have reliable polls in China. So what Chinese actually think and what they would think, if they had free media, we don't know. But it is true, as I said, in other authoritarian regimes, that if you do well economically, people like it, whether it's objective or subjective. They actually appreciate better economic performance. So, if we project those results from the Gallup World Poll, which are not conducted in China, to Chinese situation, that given the stellar economic performance of China in the last 40 years, we should actually think that Chinese are indeed happy with the regime.
Now, as I said, people usually are unhappy about lack of freedoms, but you can balance those. That is your question. As a political economist I would say, political approval depends on several factors, and one of them is economic performance. The other one is lack of freedoms. I think any single Chinese person would prefer to have freedoms rather than lack of freedoms. And the one-child policy, for example, was extremely unpopular, but economic performance appeased this position, I guess.
SR: The ideal types that you are presenting of fear and of spin dictatorships, you also make a point in the book, and I think very rightly, that you say these are not just binary opposites, we need to think of this as a spectrum. And a third of non-democracies, which you analyze in the book, are neither fear dictatorships nor spin dictatorships, so that's Qatar, Sri Lanka, Algeria. So, you might want to say something about that kind of regime. And to come back to the Chinese case, it does, in a sense, pose a puzzle because if I may quote you in the book, you say, "China seems to be heading towards spin dictatorship, but it reversed course under Xi Jinping." And you call it, and I quote you, "A strange mixture of ruthless repression, outdated ideology, modern stagecraft, and cutting-edge information technology." But ultimately, you have the intuition or evidence that is ruled by fear, not only by spin. So, could you say something about these mixed cases, neither fear, nor spin, nor both, or in the Chinese case, a reversal, going back to a kind of older model ruled by fear?
SG: There are many regimes on which we have limited data. And we wanted to define spin dictatorship as a non-democratic regime. I think on defining non-democracy versus democracy, we already have problems. For example, India, by some political scientists is perceived to be a democracy, by others a non-democracy already since 2019. And there are some other examples, Hungary is such an example, where some political scientists classify it as a democracy because it's a member of the European Union and some don't. And so, this is difficult. But more or less, I think we can agree that democracy is a regime where leaders are chosen by free and fair elections, and non-democracy is everything else. But to distinguish between spin and fear, we look at the number of political prisoners, political killings, whether there are truly independent media. They may have a very little limited audience, but they may still exist exactly for pretending that there is a lack of censorship. Those dictators say, "Look, we have a small radio station, which is critical. We have a small website, which is critical. We have a small independent university, which is critical." So, all of these things are part of the system, part of the approach. I'm not criticizing those independent critics of the regime; I'm just saying that the regime makes sure that they cannot reach out to the majority of the population.
And so, unfortunately, for many countries, it's very hard to find this data. We were actually surprised. We built a big data set, which we call authoritarian control techniques. For decades, we've collected data on political prisoners, political killings, censorship and so on. But for some countries, it's actually very hard to see if the public believes that they should be afraid of repression or not. And I'll just give you an example, you mentioned Russia. When we finished the first draft of this book, in May 2021 we said there is already a risk that Russia is moving from spin dictatorship to fear dictatorships. Why? Because we see a poll where the majority of Russians are afraid of return of mass repression. And that shows that fear is coming back. And so the majority of Russians are aware that they live in a country where repression can touch everybody. And so, that is a sign that the regime is changing from spin to fear. And the problem is that in Qatar or Algeria, it's hard to identify those numbers and give the definitions.
Now, on China, I think there was a big game changer with Xi Jinping. And actually, before that, if you think about this, scholars of China were surprised that China is moving in this direction, reproducing democratic checks and balances without becoming a democracy. So you had the regular rotation, you had term limits as the head of the People's Republic of China. Every 10 years leadership would change, and the promotion would not be done on the basis of elections, but on the basis of some meritocratic criteria. And so, the question was, why wouldn't the group on top or a person on top stay and say, "This system I don't like, and I would like to run this country forever?" And the China scholars’ community would always say that there is this legacy of Mao's cult of personality, which make everybody shiver and be afraid in the elite because it was not safe for the elite of Mao's China.
And the other thing was, for a poor country, it's much easier to determine one single meritocratic criterion for promotion, which is income growth. Once you become a middle-income economy, you have to take into account inequality, corruption, industrial safety, pollution. And that's becoming much harder, which governor to promote? Which provincial party secretary to promote? One guy is better in terms of economics, and the other one is better in terms of crime and corruption. And so, Xi Jinping eventually saw an opportunity to use high corruption within Communist Party, the fact that Mao's horrors are already forgotten to actually personalize this regime. And so, my prediction is personalistic regimes are more vulnerable to mistakes and they are much less likely to be successful economically. And so, I think we'll see some slowdown of growth in China. We already are seeing this, we already saw dramatic mistakes such as the zero-COVID policy, so something will have to give.
But honestly, when we talk to people outside of China's sinology community, people usually say China is moving into a softer version. But actually, all China scholars are in agreement that this is a political system based on fear. And one example we give in our book is that you see forced confessions of dissidents on TV. And so that is something like 1930s. The truth is that the cutting-edge digital technology, allows to monitor potential dissent before it actually takes off. So you don't need to imprison too many people, you imprison people before they can make mass protests. And this is something that the Chinese technology allows them.
SR: Sergei, let me go back to the Putin example for a moment because I had the feeling that this is where your idea of a spin dictator comes from, Putin as a paradigmatic example. Lack of ideology, a commercialized celebrity cult, the societal safety valve of marginalized oppositional outlets, and the replacement of overt political repression by pseudo-democratic, personalized targeted attacks, which are hiding behind fiscal authorities. But the question I have for you is, this carefully cultivated image, obviously, is now revealed to be a sham. Did everyone in the West make a mistake earlier in thinking they were going to deal with somebody who was a very different kind of a leader, a reliable ally, and it was only the 2014 occupation of Crimea that the Western perception changed, but even then, not really enough in Europe? So, do you think he was just pretending to be a spin dictator but was always a fear dictator? Or there has really been the transformation because he realized that being a spin dictator still has a lot of constraints on power?
SG: I think there was a true transformation the last couple of years. And this is a typical problem that spin dictators face. Putin has been, as you rightly said, a very successful spin dictator. Even after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, former French Prime Minister, François Fillon, was proud to call Putin a friend. A very important politician in France, Marine Le Pen, would travel to the Kremlin and would take money from Russia. So, the level of acceptance of Putin after 2014 is not comparable to what we see today. And the reason for that was actually before, two years ago, the number of political prisoners was quite limited, political killings were all deniable, censorship was not complete. So that was still a spin dictator's textbook. But on the other hand, spin dictators face a major problem, which is, they want to be popular, and for that, they need economic growth.
However, to have economic growth today, it's not enough to have people who can read and write, you need people whom we call knowledge workers, creative class, educated class, people with tertiary education, people that you teach, people that we teach. And these people are more critical. They're better informed. And so, one problem is you need these people for growth to convince the rest of the population. On the other hand, the more that you have people like this around, the harder it is to silence them. And that creates a major problem for all spin dictators. And some spin dictators divest the regime, and some spin dictatorships go into the direction of becoming imperfect democracies or democracies. And I give example like this in the book, in the immediate vicinity of Russia, that would be Armenia, which transformed itself in 2018 from a spin dictatorship to democracy.
Ecuador is another example. But there are also examples when spin dictators say, "I cannot manage this conundrum anymore. And so, I need to introduce the old model to cling on, to hold on to power." And in the book, we discuss the example of Venezuela where Maduro is a typical fear dictator, while his predecessor who built the system, Chávez, was a spin dictator. It's just, Maduro having neither high oil prices nor Chávez's charisma couldn't manage this regime on his own. So he moved back in time, and this is what Putin did as well. And you can actually see how Putin had this problem of low approval rating because economic growth was coming down, because opposition has become much more effective using social media, including YouTube. So, Putin was actually facing the wall, and he remembered that he overcame this problem in 2014 with annexation of Crimea, which is a typical spin dictator's war, deniable, not really bloody. So, it's really something that he wanted to replay in 2022, it's just he made a mistake. Dictators do make mistakes. That's normal. Exactly because they don't have feedback, don't have critical voices around them. So, that's normal. And I mentioned Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy already. And I think 2022 invasion in Ukraine was a great mistake by Putin.
SR: So, to continue on this particular point, do you think when they shift, do they need to invent ideologies? One of the arguments that you make is that there is an absence of a unifying and mobilizing ideology in these regimes because spin dictators are calculating pragmatists, so to speak, without many deep convictions or commitments. But here do you think, now if we stay with Putin as the example, his rediscovery of, sort of, new imperial politics, maybe an extreme, but is it a case of the cultural turn that we are probably going to see with a lot of these dictators, who need either a civilizational narrative or an ethno-nationalist one? So, are spin dictators all over the world becoming more ideological as time goes by?
SG: Ideology really helps you, but it's very hard to sell an ideology today. The world of 20th century has convinced people that ideology has not been good for Germany and Bolshevism has not been good for Soviet Union. And so, it's actually very hard to invent a convincing ideology in the 21st century, especially given that imposing complete censorship is also hard. Because even in today's Russia, they didn't block YouTube, and they didn't block the Telegram messenger, which is also a very important source of information, they cannot really block VPNs. So, all of that is harder, and you want to convince people that I'm not economically successful, but you need to tighten your belts because of ideology. But people started asking questions. And so, I agree with you that Putin is now going far beyond one could expect in terms of this imperialistic ideology, nationalism, maybe ethno-nationalism. But, it's actually creating many problems. And spin dictators, as you rightly said, are opportunists. And so they would prefer to stay as spin dictators, which is, we are democrats and democracies don't have an ideology. Ideology of democracy is prosperity and quality of life for the citizens. And if you think about this, that's in most spin dictatorships as well.
SR: So, two things occurred to me listening to you, Sergei on this. One, that you say despite all of these problems, you make a strong case for continuous engagement with these regimes by Western democracies. Although you do point out that Western democracies should also put their own house in order and stop enabling strongmen elsewhere or trying to promote democracy by means of military interventions, which really calls into question the legitimacy of these interventions. So, I think let's look at that for a moment. And then, of course, you have an interesting argument, which you just made about what would be the forces of internal change. And you think that it would be the knowledge class, the educated few. But as we see in the Russian case, you have more than almost a million of those who have left the country. Where would domestic dissent come from?
SG: This is a great question. And we indeed recommend engagement, which we call adversarial engagements. So, we need to understand that these are non-democracies, and these are not friends of the West. Earlier, you actually mentioned that we need to understand what this war has changed. And I think, fortunately, or unfortunately, when you have something as brutal as Putin's invasion in Ukraine, the West needs allies, and the West will ally itself with certain softer autocrats. The West made lots of choices like this. In the World War II as well, as you remember, where the West allied itself with Stalin, who was an outrageous fear dictator. And I think that now many spin dictators are actually very relieved seeing that, if you just don't support Putin, you've already become an ally of the West and you can do a lot of things.
Now, that said, I should say that indeed, we identify domestic force for change. And we think that this educated, creative class is a huge problem for spin dictators. And if you can engage with those legitimate agents of change, that will eventually undermine spin dictatorship. Now, it is not easy, because spin dictators also like to pretend to have business relationships to send their own enablers to the West. And so, it's difficult to distinguish between legitimate contacts and being infiltrated by dictators' enablers. And so we are not going to say it's easy but this is what needs to be done, you need to stop the scandal by spin dictators to undermine the West's own political democratic institutions. And on the other side, you want to maintain relationship and support civil society of legitimate agents of change. Now, talking about Russia, Russia is no longer a spin dictatorship. And, indeed, we see that this class is moving away. And I think eventually, if Russia goes back, probably after Putin, to something which is an imperfect democracy and/or spin dictatorship, it's very plausible to imagine a scenario when Putin is succeeded by somebody who is a non-democrat. Initially, Putin will be succeeded by somebody from his own entourage, and this person will try to put in place a spin dictatorship. And then people who can come back from the West can actually create pressure for change. So, that is yet another scenario. And in that sense, I think we are in a very difficult and uncertain moment. But I would not say that what we wrote in the book is incorrect.
SR: So, one last question which occurs to me on your idea, and I think you are right, that it's very difficult to be a spin dictator on ideological terms alone these days. Ideology can help and religion is a good mix, and civilizational ideologies do play a role, or racialized ideologies, ethno-nationalist fantasies of purity, but you need economic success. And here what occurs to me is we have, sort of, two models, that spin dictators recognize that they need to tap into the global market and succeed in attracting investment. But some of the populist leaders that we are seeing these days are advocating exactly the opposite, right? Protectionism in Turkey, make Britain Great Again at least in rhetoric, if not necessarily in actual practice, they would like to decouple, in the British case, from the European Union, for example. So, what are the economic consequences of some of these populist regimes, which are really trying, in some ways, to go back to a politics of economic nationalism and economic sovereignty?
SG: It's actually an interesting question because you remember that Brexiteers wanted to create global Britain. They wanted to say that Europe is too socialist-enclosed, we want to become much more open and liberal. Now, what the Brexit voters base was actually preferring was economic nationalism mostly because of immigration. And so, there are many places in which the populists play the immigration card. And I should say that sometimes refugee crises are not well managed. That happens as well, which again, creates opportunity for populists. But if you're asking about the evidence on economic performance of populists, there is a paper by my colleague at Sciences Po, Moritz Schularick, which is called "Populist Leaders and the Economy." And this paper is very clear. On average, the evidence on the last 100 years of populist regimes is very bad for populists. On average, if you have a populist leader winning the election today, 15 years later, your GDP will be 10 percent lower than it would have been without the populist government. So, this database that they've built over the last 100 years is the database of all populist regimes who managed to get into the office. And they show that, yes, as you rightly said, populists are more likely to be protectionist, populists are likely to try to undermine media freedom and the rule of law. And we shouldn't be surprised that's not good for economic institutions and economic performance. That doesn't mean that populists are easily voted out of office. Exactly because they destroy checks and balances in political sense, it's harder to get rid of failing populists. And so, in that sense, it's just normal. But yes, the evidence is very clear on that.
There are exceptions. And one of the exceptions is the Law and Justice Party in Poland. You can also say that before COVID, Trump was neither outperforming nor underperforming the counterfactual. But on Brexit, the evidence is very clear; from the very beginning British economy was underperforming by an important margin. The counterfactual, that would be the case without Brexit, and the margin is something, like, 1 percent of GDP growth per year. That was the cost of Brexit. So, it's the opposite of this Brexit bus, which said, "We will gain £350 million every week." That's actually the opposite. Britain has lost about £400 million per week because of Brexit.
SR: Thank you so much, Sergei, for this historical and also comparative analysis of the transformation of dictatorships from fear dictatorships to what you called spin dictatorships, and in some cases back again to elements of fear dictatorships, or fully-fledged fear dictatorships. And also, of course, for this really astute analysis of the political economy of these regimes, in contrast to some of the populist regimes that we are seeing. So, thanks very much for the interview and for being with me today.
SG: Thank you very much, Shalini.
SR: Let me summarize my conversation with Sergei Guriev on the changing face of tyranny in the 21st century. Sergei compared two kinds of dictators that use almost as a Weberian ideal type to map a change in the practices of authoritarian politics. He contrasted old style fear dictators, as he calls them, with the more recent spin dictators. Fear dictators rule by terror and totalitarian control intimidating populations into submission, using covert and also overt threats of violence. These fear dictators, he claims, have been superseded over the past decade by the so-called spin dictators who manufacture consent among the governed by imitating the appearance of democracy.
Now that democracy is the only accepted game in town, the only accepted game globally, calling oneself a despot is not only out of fashion but is also difficult spin dictators must therefore demonstrate a strong commitment to elections and to constitutions in order to win legitimacy, both domestically and internationally. But their artful imitation of democratic institutions and practices serves to undermine democracy from within. They replaced overt political repression by pseudo-democratic personalized targeted attacks against their opponents, often for example by hiding behind tax authorities. Spin dictators present themselves also as successful managers of economic growth and performance and are, therefore, something of a mix between a celebratory influencer as they are savvy users of social media, and they present themselves also as successful businessmen. To maintain power and the appearance of economic performance, they need tight control of information and media as well.
Often, they lack ideology, because ideology is no longer so easy to sell. But we also learnt about the third category that Guriev calls non-democracies, neither spin nor fear dictators, and he counted countries like Qatar, Sri Lanka, Algeria, among those. China, in his view, seemed to be heading towards spin dictatorship, but has reversed course under Xi Jinping to become more of a fear dictatorship. It's a strange mixture of ruthless repression, outdated ideology, modern stagecraft, and cutting-edge information technology used for surveillance. Despite our dislike of these regimes, he argues it is important for Western governments to continue to engage with these in the sense of an adversarial engagement. But ultimately opposition to spin dictatorships must come from within the country. The most likely domestic force that can bring about a regime change in his view is the educated, creative class, the group that has currently left Russia in millions.
This was the sixth episode of season six of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening and join us again for the next episode. However, this time after three weeks, after Easter. I will be talking then with Yehouda Shenhav, Tel Aviv, about Israeli democracy and the ongoing protests against the constitutional coup by the governing coalition. Please go back and listen to any of the episodes you might have missed. And, of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. And you can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.