Parole failure in the United States is a growing problem. Prison admissions for parole violations in 2000 were equal to all prison admissions in 1980. By 2021, conditional release violations accounted for 29 percent of all prison admissions. This carceral churn — where people move from prison to parole, then violate parole restrictions and wind up back in prison — is a sign of a flawed system. But why does this happen? In a recent CDDRL Research Seminar talk, Gillian Slee — Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow in Rule of Law at CDDRL — explored the parole system’s struggles, highlighting the importance of examining the “personal sides” of institutions.

Previous works paint three broad challenges with the parole system: material hardship, where structural adversity complicates life after prison; negative social networks, where disadvantaged social ties can constrain compliance; and carceral governance, where criminal-legal oversight reconstitutes the experience of citizenship. Slee, however, proposes a crucial fourth explanation for why re-entry fails: socioemotional dynamics.

Drawing on two years of extensive ethnographic fieldwork with people on parole in Pennsylvania, Slee’s research reveals how the parole system often overlooks values like dignity and agency, inadvertently prompting parolees to withdraw from or subvert parole guidelines. This structural inattention to how parolees actually interact with institutions leads to rule-breaking, pushing parolees away from supportive resources and toward reincarceration.

How does the parole system affect socioemotional dynamics? Slee identifies three mechanisms:

First, parole rules often fail to align with the needs of parolees, overlooking unrecognized vulnerabilities. Many of the parolees, Slee observed, had been referred to resources they were, practically speaking, ineligible for, forcing them into difficult situations. Parolees see re-entry as “being born grown,” often needing to take on extra jobs, strike borderline deals with landlords, or find shared living arrangements — all of which compromise their sense of dignity and autonomy.

Second, discretion has both benefits and drawbacks. The uneven application of discretion among parole officers incentivizes parolees to live life “in the red,” socializing rule-breaking through direct and indirect experiences. This socializing force creates winners and losers, where those who comply face isolation while those who bend the rules risk reincarceration.

Third, the parole system imposes risk-escalating rules. Many states prohibit parolees from associating with other prior offenders, rendering an important source of support illicit. These rules sideline concerns of parolees’ need for belonging and companionship, prompting them to rule-break to satisfy said needs.

Slee reminds us of the importance of the personal dimensions of policy research. Intimate ethnography allows us to unpack the subtle nuances of how humans interact with institutions. Her findings also highlight a much-needed policy recommendation: parole systems need to recognize the dignity and agency of parolees re-entering society. Whether by simplifying bureaucratic processes, reforming the nature and scope of supervision, or instituting more flexible compliance measures, policymakers must address the socioemotional needs of parolees to support reintegration rather than perpetuate cycles of incarceration. 

The U.S. faces increasing levels of political polarization. Bipartisan disagreements over moral, cultural, and socioeconomic issues have turned into social conflict, political gridlock, and personal animosity. How did we get here? The dominant narrative has argued that identity cleavages have caused increasing splits in values. Yet Klaus Desmet — Research Fellow at CEPR, Research Associate at NBER, and the Altshuler Professor of Cities, Regions, and Globalization at Southern Methodist University — painted a different picture in a CDDRL seminar series talk.

Leveraging data from seven waves of the World Values Survey (WVS), Desmet develops a new methodology to study the evolution of these social divisions. For Desmet, the problem with an identity-based measure of polarization is that these demographic traits do not necessarily align with people’s values. If we care about splits in values, we need to create social partitions based on values, not identity traits.

Desmet asks how individuals would optimally form groups based on “homophily in values.” If people associate with others who hold similar views, they will sort themselves into groups based on these preferences. Individuals leave groups with fewer shared values and join groups with more shared values. Eventually, this self-sorting process reaches what Desmet calls a “Global Values Identification Equilibrium (VIE),” where within-group value heterogeneity is lowest and between-group value heterogeneity highest. Importantly, Desmet can then compare the split in values between these underlying clusters (latent polarization) to the split in values between Democrats and Republicans (partisan polarization).

What does the model find? While many have argued that America has witnessed a shift from disagreements on redistribution to disagreements on culture, Desmet’s findings indicate otherwise. Since at least the early 1980s, the latent values-based clusters have been divided mostly along moral and religious values, and the level of disagreement has been remarkably stable. There is no evidence of latent polarization increasing over time, and the underlying conditions for the culture wars have been present for a long time.

Partisan polarization, on the other hand, is a more recent development. Using the same model, Desmet shows that in 1981, the average value positions of Democrats and Republicans were almost indistinguishable, nowhere close to aligned with the endogenous clusters. By 2017, however, the average positions of Democrats and Republicans have diverged, aligning with the positions of the values-based clusters. These findings suggest that there has been rising partisan polarization in spite of stable latent polarization.

How might we explain this sequence of events? Desmet suggests that increasing partisan polarization may be a consequence of politicians discovering which values are particularly salient for political mobilization. Instead of politicians engendering value splits in society, partisanship has become more representative of people’s values. The American public has long had the conditions to be divided — they just needed parties to catch on. 

In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Fellow Maria Snegovaya discussed findings from her latest book, When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right (Oxford University Press, 2024). Eastern European party politics have seen two concurrent trends in recent years, namely the rise of populist right parties and the decline of leftist social democratic parties. Snegovaya, who is an adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, unpacked this puzzling dynamic by centering the economic policy preferences of key electoral constituencies.

Existing theories have largely attempted to explain these two trends as independent phenomena, often attributing them to weak party organization, anti-incumbent bias, and changes in class structure. Snegovaya argued that these explanations only tell half the story.

Throughout the 1990s, social democratic parties in Eastern Europe adopted neoliberal market reforms, among other reasons, out of interest in accommodating the demands of European Union (EU) accession. These conditions prioritized low inflation, low fiscal deficit, and moderate state indebtedness. For the social democratic parties in power, this meant advancing privatization, reducing state involvement in the economy, and cutting back on social welfare spending.

While this shift appealed to middle-class voters, the cutting of redistributive policies widened socio-economic inequality. Thus, constituencies who depended heavily on state support became increasingly disillusioned with the left. Combining individual-level data from the European Social Survey with election data from 45 elections in 10 countries, Snegovaya showed that as leftist parties adopted increasingly right-leaning economic policies, their vote shares dropped, especially among the working class.

Meanwhile, populist right parties took advantage of this discontent, campaigning on protectionist platforms that advocated for redistributive policies. Most scholars argue that populist right parties capture electoral victories through the xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric of their nativist platforms. When Left Moves Right does not discount this argument but qualifies that these parties managed to attract voters by combining those stances with appeals to their economic needs, filling the void left by the neoliberal turn of social democratic parties.

The book underscores points of convergence and divergence between party politics in Postcommunist European states and that of the rest of the world. Mirroring trends across Western Europe and Latin America, social democratic parties in Eastern Europe secured short-term electoral gains through pro-market rebranding. But in the long run, they lost the votes of working-class voters who had depended heavily on redistributive policies.

At the same time, the trends exhibited by Postcommunist European states are distinct in other respects. For instance, beyond pressures to join the EU, social democratic parties have shifted away from redistributive platforms to distance themselves from their former communist legacies. The working class in Eastern Europe constitutes around two-thirds of the electorate, which meant that the losses imposed by neoliberal economic policies were felt more widely than in many other countries.

When Left Moves Right invites more critical reflection on the conditions shaping democratic resilience in nascent democracies, particularly as they relate to the configuration of party politics, as well as parallels in this dynamic with more advanced democracies.

Why do elites in authoritarian regimes choose to pursue democratic transitions? In a CDDRL research seminar series talk, James Fearon, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), offers a theory to explain the methods and motivations behind elite-led democratization. Fearon probes how authoritarian elites safeguard their power through autocratic constitutions, focusing on Myanmar, one of the longest-lived military regimes in the post-WWII era.

The Tatmadaw — Myanmar’s armed forces — held exclusive power after General Ne Win took control in a 1962 coup d’état until the early 2010s when they pursued a power-sharing arrangement with a civilian opposition. In 2008, the military junta that ruled from 1988 to 2011 ratified a new constitution they had drafted in a dubious referendum. While the 2008 Constitution appeared to take steps toward democracy, it featured serious limitations. It handed the military full control over several key ministries, secured “rent” streams for the officers, and reserved a quarter of parliamentary seats for military-appointed representatives. It further required that any changes to the constitution be passed by 75% of the legislature, thus giving them an effective veto.

In the November 2015 General Election, the opposition scored an overwhelming victory. The National League for Democracy Party (NLD) won close to three-fourths of the seats, giving them a large parliamentary majority and a strong ability to pass laws even if they were formally constrained on changing the constitution. The trajectory of these events raises the question, why did the military choose to pursue a democratic transition? Relatedly, why did military leaders believe that the 2008 Constitution would sufficiently protect them? Fearon observes that one of the NLD’s first actions was to create a new head-of-state position outside the constitution for Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD’s leader.

Fearon argues that the military was protected not by the formal constitution, which is just a piece of paper, but rather by maintaining direct control of important streams of income and policy influence in the form of staffing of the bureaucracy and control of natural resource and drug incomes in militarily contested parts of the country. Control of these “rent streams” meant that the new NLD government could not shift them away from the military simply passing laws in parliament — even though the NLD did have considerable control and influence on many other dimensions of policy. In effect, this was a power (and rent) sharing division of the state.

Authoritarian rulers face international and domestic pressures, such as economic and political sanctions and costly revolutionary threats. Continued authoritarian rule would preserve elites’ control of the country’s existing resources. Movement toward democratization, on the other hand, generates both opportunities and costs. It comes with the promise of lifting international sanctions and increasing the flow of foreign aid, thus increasing the total economic “pie” available. However, the military could only take full advantage of that economic opening if they maintained a significant degree of economic and political control that the newly elected government could not revise without provoking a costly conflict (such as a coup attempt to reverse democratization). More general, Fearon argues that autocratic elites will be more inclined to try democratization when they can share rent streams and their military ability to retake power if this is challenged does not decline too rapidly after the transition.

Elite-led democratic transitions hold unique implications. On the one hand, top-down transitions are more efficient than bottom-up democratic revolutions because they reduce the costs and risks of violence. On the other hand, transitions led by undemocratic leaders are likely to result in only partial democratization because they tend to perpetuate preexisting power dynamics by reinforcing the influence of ruling elites and maintaining their access to rents.

Fearon proposes that as newly democratized societies begin to institutionalize, the relative power of the old elites may gradually diminish, leading to “endogenous consolidation.” Yet, if the military sees its power fading faster than expected, it may — as in the aftermath of Myanmar’s 2020 elections — intervene militarily to restore the status quo ante.

In a weekly research seminar, CDDRL's Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow Julieta Casas explored the varied paths of civil service reform in the Americas during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her research emphasized the significant impact of patronage systems, particularly the practices surrounding employee dismissals, on the success or failure of these reform efforts.

Patronage systems were frameworks in which government jobs and resources were allocated based on loyalty to political leaders rather than solely merit or qualifications. Although many countries in the Americas operated under such systems during this historical period, the mode of bureaucratic management differed greatly across contexts. The United States and Argentina had similar patronage systems after independence but diverged after the rise of mass politics. That divergence helps us understand why the United States successfully moved to a merit-based civil service system while Argentina encountered significant difficulties in making similar changes.

Casas argued that the practices related to employee dismissals were pivotal in influencing the momentum of reform movements. In the United States, public servants were often dismissed following elections, leading to a significant number of fired employees and job seekers who self-selected out of applying to jobs in the public administration due to the uncertainty of tenure. This created widespread dissatisfaction among civil servants, which political entrepreneurs leveraged to push for civil service reform as a way to improve government efficiency.

In contrast, Argentina's patronage system provided considerable job security to public employees, even during political transitions. As a result, Argentine civil servants experienced fewer grievances and were less motivated to push for systemic change. Rather than advocating for a comprehensive overhaul of the bureaucracy, they primarily focused on labor rights, seeking improvements in wages and working conditions. The absence of a constituency autonomous to the state in favor of reform hindered civil service reform efforts in Argentina, making it challenging to garner the necessary political support.

In building this case, Casas employed diverse methods, utilizing original archival evidence from both the United States and Argentina. She analyzed a variety of archival sources, including civil service reform bills, bureaucratic censuses, government documents, reports from public employee associations, and contemporary accounts, to trace the evolution of bureaucratic and political dynamics, with particular attention to employee turnover before and after the rise of mass politics. Additionally, her quantitative analysis of firing rates and employment trends within the civil service offered a comprehensive understanding of how different patronage systems evolved.

Casas’ research underscored how firing practices within patronage systems significantly shaped divergent trajectories of bureaucratic development across the Americas. The frequent dismissals in the United States created an environment that propelled reform movements forward, while the stable employment conditions in Argentina dampened the drive for professionalization. Her findings provided valuable insights into the complexities of bureaucratic reform, highlighting the critical role of personnel management in determining the success or failure of efforts to professionalize government institutions.

How does the history and culture of the American West affect its capacity to address Climate Change? In a CDDRL seminar talk, Bruce Cain addressed the question by drawing on findings from his latest book, Under Fire and Under Water: Wildfire, Flooding, and the Fight for Climate Resilience in the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023). Cain — director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and CDDRL faculty affiliate — argued that the federalist nature of the U.S., along with regional history and idiosyncratic human behavior, have made resolving collective action problems uniquely difficult.

Cain opened his talk with a reflection on American federalism. He indicated that the U.S. strongly federalist political system aims to delegate the provisions of specific public goods across its national, state, and local jurisdictions. However, the worsening issue of climate change — and its negative externalities — transcends these jurisdictional borders, thereby creating a coordination challenge. There is fracture at both the vertical level — between federal, state, and local governments — and the horizontal level, across branches of government and between states and localities themselves. Polarization, geographic sorting, and rising inequality have exacerbated the problem.

Adequately addressing climate change requires extensive coordination and planning, which is not often the strength of a highly diverse democracy. Furthermore, the public, even when it is not polarized along party lines, may hesitate to take sufficient steps to protect climate progress because people may not want to pay now for future benefits.

This national framework serves as the backdrop for the West’s regional history. The initial move to the West required incentives, as people were uneasy traveling into a land seen as untamed and wild. This created an appropriative culture, as settlers had to be motivated to undertake the risks of living and working in the American West. After World War II, the private nature of this land began to get in the way of the maturing environmental movement.

The Western climate is arid, a characteristic that will be further exemplified by the changing climate. As such, in California, we face two “water problems.” First a “too little” water problem — droughts. But we also face a “too much” water problem — sea level rise and flooding. The “too little” water problem leads to extensive wildfires — the smoke from which has serious health effects. While fires are one of the most visible and concerning effects of climate change, their bearing on electoral outcomes is marginal, as only a small number of people lose their homes in a given year.

In many places where homes have been destroyed, they tend to be promptly rebuilt. Unfortunately, this is not the only case of building in disaster-prone areas. Infrastructure continues to be built in flood zones on the coast, and neighborhoods routinely decimated by fires are erected time and time again. But this issue is confronted with a competing priority, namely the lack of housing in the state, making policy decisions all the more complicated.

Governmental fractioning and perverse incentives make the coordination necessary to address these issues even more difficult.

So what does all of this mean going forward? Cain believes the federalist nature of this country may mean a lower ceiling on progress but a higher floor in the long run. Our progress will be slower but more resilient to party shifts in the executive. He also predicts that U.S. decarbonization efforts will vary more by income and lag behind other OECD countries. Finally, in the absence of coordination, the U.S. strength will remain in providing innovation and pushing for the early adoption of first-mover policies.

A copy of Cain's presentation slides can be viewed here.

How can we encourage citizens to comply with desired civic behaviors? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Salma Mousa, assistant professor of Political Science at UCLA and former CDDRL postdoctoral fellow, explored this broader question via a field experiment in Lebanon. In conjunction with a municipality and local NGO, Mousa and her team evaluated the effectiveness of a waste sorting intervention.

In 2015, some of Lebanon’s primary landfills reached capacity, forcing displaced waste into the streets and prompting public outcry. Lebanon's crisis is not for lack of money; the country spends ten times more than nearby Tunisia despite having only half the population of Tunisia. This suggests that Lebanon’s issue reflects mismanagement rather than a lack of resources.

A key component of this mismanagement is a lack of sorting at the source of waste. Effective sorting, Mousa argues, requires collaboration between citizens, civil society, and government. Overcoming this collective action problem does not just require physical infrastructure and intrinsic motivation; it also requires that people trust that their neighbors and government will do their part.

To test their sorting intervention, Mousa and her collaborators chose the small, wealthy, and predominantly Christian town of Bikfaya. The town is characterized by high levels of social cohesion and a “green” reputation that is central to its identity.

Working with the municipality and an NGO called “Nadeera,” the team divided the town into neighborhoods, randomly assigning treatment and control. The treatment group received a box with QR codes they could put on their trash bags and an app where they could access feedback on their sorting. They were given instructions on proper waste management and told to sort their waste into recycling, organic materials and other — sticking their personal QR codes on each bag.

After pickup, inspectors at the nearby waste management facility would use the app to provide personalized feedback on sorting quality, giving participants the opportunity to improve.

This intervention makes trash sorting a sanctionable behavior, with social pressure to enforce it, because participation is visible to neighbors via the QR code stickers placed on their trash bags.

The team examined three distinct outcomes. First, the quality of sorting. Second, participation in a raffle for “green” prizes, designed to measure the impact of the intervention on other climate-friendly behaviors. Finally, they measured participation in volunteer opportunities for environmental initiatives.

Two months after the intervention, the program improved sorting quality by an average of 14 percent. That said, at the twelve-month mark, the effect was null. Eight months in, the program and app feedback ceased, making it difficult to distinguish between diminishing long-term effects and lack of sanctioning.

Treated participants entered the raffle at two times the rate of the control group, but the mechanisms behind this increase remain unclear. The rise in uptake could be attributed to behavioral change or familiarity with the NGO as a result of treatment.

On the volunteering measure, the treated group saw a 7% negative effect, meaning they were less likely to sign up for local environmental initiatives if assigned to treatment. Mousa and her collaborators theorize that this is due to moral licensing, or the feeling that they have already done their part.

While the effects of the primary outcome became null after a year, the treated group did see a substantial improvement in sorting quality — a big win for the town on environmental and economic measures. Future iterations of this intervention will include consistent monitoring or cash benefits to promote prolonged participation.

How have pre-communist social structures persisted in Russia, and why does this persistence matter for understanding post-communist political regime trajectories? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Tomila Lankina, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed her award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book challenges the assumption that the 1917 revolution succeeded in leveling old estate hierarchies, arguing that these social structures persist today. 

While analyses of the bourgeoisie factor heavily into the understanding of many societies, the relevance of this group is frequently left out when discussing countries like Russia and China, on the assumption that they had been completely leveled by revolutionary ruptures. Lankina’s book critically assesses this assumption. It adopts a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, utilizing archives, subnational comparisons, statistical analysis, social network analysis, and interviews with descendants. 

In characterizing the social structure of pre-communist Russia, Lankina noted that peasants comprised 77 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution. Other social groups, which she refers to as “educated estates” because of their higher literacy rates compared to those of peasants, included the urban meshchane, the merchants, nobility, and clergy. Out of the educated estates, meshchane constituted the majority, or 10 percent of the population. While their homes appeared rather modest, members of the meshchane exhibited characteristics of the urban bourgeoisie, and even their dress differed from that of the rural estate. They enjoyed much higher literacy rates than peasants.

Lankina explained that the comparatively high status of these “educated estates” — the meshchane, merchants, nobility, and clergy — persisted even after the Bolshevik revolution. To illustrate this, she highlighted partially intact social circles of the highly networked merchants, nobles, and tsarist-inspired soviet schools. Letters from the Samara province indicate that while many high-status citizens emigrated, there were matriarchs who stayed, spreading the tsarist-era values to their children and grandchildren after the revolution. Regardless of whether this middle class was endowed with democratic values, Lankina maintained that they passed human and entrepreneurial capital onto their offspring.

How did these estates endure? While the literature clearly articulates what happened to the ruling classes following the revolution, less time has been spent understanding what happened to the educated, middle-class segments of society. How did they adapt? 

Lankina proposed three different routes. First is the “pop-up brigade,” wherein young, educated individuals traveled around promoting education to peasant workers, instantly employable and absorbable into a new society. Then there is the “museum society,” where prominent nobles and merchants joined insular cultural institutions like archives, provincial libraries, and museums. Finally, “the organization man” denotes professionally skilled individuals, such as medics, who retained their positions following the revolution as the social hierarchy got absorbed into newer organizations. 

To illustrate the significance of this persistence in social structures and values, Lankina, drawing on her co-authored paper with Alexander Libman (APSR 2021), indicated that meshchane concentration (as opposed to more recent educational indices) is a better predictor of a post-communist region’s openness, at least in the 1990s.

Is Ukraine too corrupt to be a part of the European Union? In a recent Rethinking European Development and Security (REDS) seminar talk co-hosted by CDDRL and The Europe Center, Maria Popova, McGill University Associate Professor of Political Science, assessed how serious the issue of Ukrainian corruption really is. While some observers have claimed that Ukraine’s corruption renders it unprepared for EU accession, Popova’s research suggests otherwise. Contrasting Ukraine to recent EU entrants — Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia — she finds that corruption indices are not very helpful in drawing reliable conclusions.

In all four said countries, corruption is touted as the most salient issue, with strikingly similar scandals occurring across them. Over the last ten years, Ukraine has developed an extensive anti-corruption infrastructure, forming institutions for the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of corruption cases, as well as for asset recovery. These institutions have produced mixed results, and issues of political competition between institutions have tainted their wider reputation, with the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption receiving the most positive feedback. Innovative e-procurement systems like ProZorro have been internationally praised. Ukraine is unique in that its anti-corruption infrastructure came well before attempting EU accession. 

Bulgaria, on the other hand, established its anti-corruption agencies ten years after becoming an EU member. These institutions have since become politically compromised; so much so that anti-corruption reformists recently forced their abolition. 

In Romania, institutions were created around the time of accession and have been successful in holding corrupt oligarchs accountable. Similarly, Croatia’s anti-corruption reforms proceeded during accession negotiations.

Although the four countries adopted similar anti-corruption institutional reforms, today Ukraine tracks as significantly more corrupt than the EU members across measures of regime, public sector, executive, and political corruption, even though it is cleaner than Romania was when it started accession negotiations, more corrupt than Bulgaria was, and equally corrupt as Croatia at its start of negotiations. Why? Popova argued that the indices are fundamentally non-comparative and thus need to be taken with a grain of salt. The score for each country is determined by experts that focus exclusively on that country, who consider variation in corruption over time only. Moreover, the abstract conceptual definition of corruption is applied to their narrow case knowledge and experience and thus reflects local, rather than generalizable conceptualization. 

While index scores correlate with local perceptions, this, too, may just reflect a narrative on the ground. If the local narrative is that the country is highly corrupt, the population will likely perceive it to be, with no sense of its real magnitude. 

When analyzing Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions, Popova finds that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession than is widely assumed.

What is authoritarian sharp power, and how has it shaped the current geopolitical landscape and the state of democracy around the globe? In a CDDRL research seminar series talk, Christopher Walker — Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy — and Will Dobson, the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, discussed their new book Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power (Johns Hopkins University Press 2023). The co-authors argue that dictators have moved beyond the suppression of their own citizens and are now actively attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies. 

Conventional wisdom of the last 25 years suggests that the solution to our “authoritarian problem” is simple: the passage of time. Over time, scholars argued, authoritarian political systems would gradually and peacefully give way to democratic ones, with rising demands for political rights. Globalization would bind authoritarian elites to their Western counterparts via business, and the internet would expose citizens to new ways of thinking. 

However, the authoritarian regimes have not subsided. In fact, they have worked to undermine democratic institutions in other countries. Thus, Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power serves as a rebuttal to these illusions, arguing that free societies can no longer afford this sort of complacency. 

Autocrats see democracies as an existential threat to their way of rule, both at home and abroad. Accordingly, they have begun reaching across borders to stymie democracy where it does not exist and undermine it where it does. 

How are they doing this? By attacking the facet of democratic society people believed was its principal strength, namely its openness. While autocrats are able to harden themselves and their societies from the free world, commitment to democracy fundamentally means a free exchange of ideas. This allows autocrats to target the minds of foreign publics by manipulating key institutions, such as universities, think tanks, media outlets, and entertainment companies. 

But it is not just autocrats’ outward-looking strategy that has permitted this infiltration; democracies themselves are complacent. Many powerful actors have been willing to cede their values and principles, sometimes for money or prestige, but sometimes just due to a lack of understanding and foresight. 

To prevent further influence, Walker and Dobson stress that democracies need to take both reactive and proactive measures. In response to the offense of autocracies, democracies must commit to prioritizing openness and transparency. They must, for example, prevent deals that extend China’s influence. Democracies must also work to correct knowledge asymmetries and think of innovative ways to get information about China and its role into the wider world. On the proactive front, democracies must defend their own values and the intrinsic benefit of a democratic system.