To receive insights from our experts and guest speakers, sign up for APARC newsletters >

Following his keynote remarks, Khalil joined a panel discussion with William Dobson, the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and a veteran in international reporting, and Elora Shehabuddin, a professor of gender and women's studies and the director of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. James Hamilton, Stanford University’s vice provost for undergraduate education, the Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Journalism Program, chaired the discussion. Both Dobson and Hamilton also serve on the judging committee for the Shorenstein Award.

The Shorenstein Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists and news outlets whose work has deepened the understanding of Asia while advancing the values of a free press.
 

Bearing Witness 

Khalil opened his remarks by sharing a photograph of himself listening to a Bangladeshi woman whose son had been abducted by the Rapid Action Battalion, the country’s elite counterterrorism force that has been accused of serious human rights violations and abuse of power. For Khalil, the image encapsulates the animating question at the heart of Netra News: What does it truly mean to comfort the afflicted?

Investigative journalists, he argued, are first and foremost witnesses. Their work requires listening and documenting, for as long as it takes. He described an investigation that started with a phone call from a day laborer in Malaysia, who recounted his experience being abducted in Dhaka and held in a secret site by a plainclothed squad. Khalil kept calling back with questions, continuing the conversation over months. The source shared precise recollections that helped Netra News map a clandestine detention facility in the heart of the Bangladeshi capital. The investigation, "Secret Prisoners of Dhaka," published in 2023, shed light on hidden abuses and was shortlisted for the Global Shining Light Award for investigative journalism in developing countries. 

Khalil described other Netra News investigations that have sought to expose high-level crimes. “Body Count” combined data journalism and fieldwork to analyze more than a decade of alleged extrajudicial killings and acts of torture by Bangladeshi security forces. The patterns revealed which agencies were involved, geographic concentration, and spikes in killings during election cycles, all underscoring a systematic practice. For this work, the newsroom won a 2024 Sigma Award for Data Journalism.

Bearing witness, Khalil noted, means that public interest journalism must listen not only to the afflicted, but also to the perpetrators of horrible crimes. In another project, collaborating with German TV broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Netra News interviewed former Rapid Action Battalion commanders on camera about how extrajudicial killings were carried out. The investigation, "Inside the Death Squad," was the first to provide evidence of targeted killings and torture by the RAB, and was recognized with a 2024 Human Rights Press Award for documentary video.

Another joint investigation with DW exposed a pattern of deploying RAB members implicated in torture and killings to serve as United Nations peacekeepers. The revelations were cited by governments and lawmakers, and intensified scrutiny of peacekeeping vetting practices. 

“This is accountability journalism at its purest: reporting that not only informs, but also confronts power and demands justice, said Hamilton in his remarks before the award presentation.

Khalil situated this kind of reportage within a normative framework of journalism that defends democracy and human rights, for which he outlined four roles: monitorial (watching and warning), facilitative (bringing opposing segments of society together), radical (challenging institutions in the name of rights and freedoms), and collaborative (engaging with power when appropriate). First and foremost, this kind of journalism serves the public interest.

An Experiment in Exile

Those commitments guided Netra News from its inception. Khalii established the outlet in 2019 in Sweden, where he had lived in exile since 2008, seeking refuge following his detention and torture by the Bangladeshi military intelligence agency. As he set up the newsroom in exile with colleagues, he made a deliberate choice: rather than defending democratic norms from afar, they would “cover Bangladesh as if it were a democracy, like Sweden or the United States, and report accordingly.”

That meant reporting with no self-censorship or fear. Due to security risks to staff in-country, Netra News adopted the discipline of an intelligence operation, eschewing daily news coverage and opinions to concentrate instead on meticulously vetted investigations. With its reporters distributed across multiple countries and some working undercover in Bangladesh, the newsroom combined offshore editorial independence with on-the-ground reporting, publishing its investigations in both Bangla and English. This approach uniquely positioned the newsroom to cover the July 2024 uprising in Bangladesh with uncommon access.

Now, a year after mass protests toppled Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime, and 18 years after he fled the country, Khalil has returned to open a Netra News bureau in Dhaka. Receiving the Shorenstein Journalism Award on behalf of the outlet at this moment, he said, is both recognition of its impact since its founding and a signal of support to the next generation of journalists carrying its mission forward.
 

Youth-Led Uprising in Context

During the discussion that followed Khalil’s keynote, the panelists considered the prospects for democracy in Bangladesh, the economics of investigative reporting, and the dynamics of youth-led protests in Asia.

Asked how the media landscape in Bangladesh had shifted since the 2024 uprising, Khalil said the media’s muscle memory remains one of censorship and fear. The challenge now is to “unlearn stenography,” that is, the practice of reporting only what those in power say, and build habits of dispassionate public interest journalism that scrutinizes both state and non-state power. That includes the interim government, corporate interests, and majoritarian religious forces.

Investigative journalism is a tough business to monetize and sustain. Khalil explained that Netra News is a nonprofit and that grant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy has made it possible. Long-term independence, however, will require earning monetary support from the people it serves. “The ultimate test is asking the public, ‘Will you pay for this?’”

Turning to Gen Z protest movements that have swept across South Asia, Dobson noted a wave of digitally savvy youth mobilizations pressing entrenched elites for substantive change. “People want real change, not shuffling the same roster of political players.” The youth-led uprisings that swept through Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and, more recently, Nepal, explained Dobson, had not originally set out to topple the established regimes, but to fight deepening inequality and economic disparities. The agendas changed, however, due to the lack of responsiveness from political institutions that have been hollowed out by patronage and corruption.

Shehabuddin underscored the central role women activists played in Bangladesh’s 2024 protests, leading from the front to help topple the authoritarian government, only to find themselves largely absent from decision-making led by the interim government.

The event concluded with questions from the audience about journalism in transitional contexts and under strain amid democratic backsliding. Newsrooms should aim to serve the entirety of society, said Khalil, alluding to the fragmented media landscape in the United States. As for standing up to anti-democratic power, he returned to first principles: the media’s charge is to bear witness, especially when those in power disapprove.

Motivation and Summary

Modern states depend upon bureaucracies effectively delivering services and enforcing regulations, from public health to environmental protection and postal services. When bureaucracies are plagued by inefficiency and incapacity and are unable to “deliver the goods,” elected representatives suffer. This can open the door for citizens to throw their support behind authoritarian leaders who promise to deliver more effectively.

A central question of bureaucratic design concerns the degree of autonomy that ‘principals’ — political actors like legislators — should delegate to bureaucratic ‘agents.’ Calibrating autonomy is crucial because principals cannot perfectly monitor or control agents, whose preferences often diverge from their own. On the one hand, highly autonomous bureaucrats may become unaccountable to their principals. Think of national security agencies that create secretive dissident watchlists or even authorize assassinations. On the other hand, bureaucracies with little autonomy will find their decision-making hamstrung by “red tape.” If public health agencies required extensive legislative approval for every aspect of vaccine delivery, infection rates would skyrocket. How, then, can bureaucracies be designed to achieve their goals, creatively respond to new problems, and minimize corruption, all while being perceived as legitimate?

In “Calibrating autonomy,” Katherine Bersch and Francis Fukuyama disaggregate the concept of autonomy into two facets (independence and discretion), present hypotheses concerning how each facet relates to capacity and quality, and then test these hypotheses, primarily using survey data from Brazilian bureaucrats. Their findings caution against overly blunt efforts to calibrate autonomy across multiple bureaucracies, suggesting instead that policymakers should understand a given agency’s capacity to perform.

Argument and Hypotheses

The article builds on earlier research by co-author Francis Fukuyama, who in 2013 hypothesized a key moderating role for bureaucratic capacity in the relationship between autonomy and quality. Briefly, low-capacity agencies — lacking expertise and resources — will likely struggle to utilize their autonomy and deliver, whereas high-capacity bureaucracies will deliver effectively for opposite reasons. However, autonomy is itself a complex concept that ought to be disentangled before one can begin to spell out how it is linked to delivery.

Independence, the first “face” of autonomy, concerns the degree to which bureaucrats are constrained by actors who are close to politics, such as elected leaders or politically-appointed agency heads. More independent bureaucrats might allocate waste management contracts on the basis of cost-effectiveness or service quality records. Less independent bureaucrats might allocate according to the whims of politicians who wish to reward their allies. The degree of independence is oftentimes a function of the number and extent of political appointees in a given agency. 

The second face of autonomy is discretion, or rather, the extent to which agencies are constrained by laws, rules, or protocols. Waste management agencies with limited discretion may struggle to respond to sporadic garbage pile-ups, whereas those with high discretion may set unpredictable collection schedules. 

These two faces of autonomy lead to different expectations about how they are connected to quality. The authors hypothesize that independence and quality stand in a linear and positive relationship: agencies that are more unconstrained by political actors will deliver more effectively. By contrast, discretion and quality stand in a non-linear or “Goldilocks” relationship: too few and too many constraining rules will reduce quality. Following Fukuyama’s earlier research, capacity moderates these relationships; for example, less independence in specifically low-capacity agencies may strengthen quality, perhaps in cases where legislative actors are able to appoint highly qualified experts.

Methods and Findings

The authors select Brazil as their case, in part because it exhibits considerable internal variation in bureaucratic quality: some agencies are professional while others are incompetent. By focusing on one country, they avoid comparing fundamentally different national bureaucratic contexts. Further, selecting Brazil — with both strong and weak bureaucracies — reduces ‘selection biases,’ i.e., mistaking characteristics of only high- or low-quality agencies as causes of overall performance. From a global standpoint, Brazilian bureaucracies are solidly middle-ranged, neither outstanding nor abysmal. 

The main empirical part of the paper involves a 2018 survey of over 3200 Brazilian federal bureaucrats. About 60% of the respondents are political appointees and 40% are civil servants, which enables looking at bureaucrats who stand in different relationships to political actors. The authors exclude military personnel, teachers, nurses, and local police officers.

As hypothesized, respondents’ perceptions of agency independence increase their perceptions of quality in a linear way. This finding likely reflects Brazil’s coalitional style of government: politicians benefit electorally from strong government performance; without bureaucratic independence, political pressure and influence from the many coalition partners would likely hinder bureaucrats and weaken performance. Meanwhile, perceptions of discretion align with the authors’ non-linear expectations.
 

Image

Figure 3: (a) Impact of independence on quality at varying levels of capacity. (b) Impact of discretion on quality at varying levels of capacity.
 

These findings are mediated by capacity, which the authors measure in terms of resources, career length, salaries, and the proportion of agents in core or expert careers. The findings hold even when controlling for political factors like party membership or appointment type (political vs. civil servant), individual characteristics such as gender or years of service, and agency differences, including budget or size. These controls are based on administrative data from over 326,000 bureaucrats across Brazil’s 95 most important federal agencies.
 

Image

Figure 4: Quality at varying levels of capacity.
 

Contributions and Implications

“Calibrating autonomy” makes important conceptual and empirical contributions to our understanding of bureaucratic performance. By disaggregating the concept of autonomy into independence and discretion, it helps make sense of seemingly contradictory empirical findings, namely that both minimally and highly autonomous bureaucracies perform well. And by evaluating their hypotheses about the two faces of autonomy using Brazilian data, the authors guard against selection biases or problems from comparing countries with quite different bureaucratic landscapes.

The paper serves as a caution against overly simplistic or blunt “solutions” to poor bureaucratic performance. Merely limiting discretion or increasing legislative oversight can make matters worse if the relevant bureaucratic culture is not properly understood, especially when it comes to capacity.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

CDDRL Mosbacher Director Kathryn Stoner noted that: “This award is a powerful testament to the incredible quality of Erin and Brett’s pathbreaking research. Their work significantly advances our understanding of how modern authoritarian regimes function in the 21st century, and I am so pleased that our CDDRL community helped to support some of their scholarship. But this honor is all theirs!”

The William H. Riker Book Award adds to the growing recognition of the Carters’ research: Propaganda in Autocracies has also received the Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award from the International Journal of Press/Politics, along with honorable mentions for both the APSA Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics and the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Best Book Award.

With this honor, Erin Baggott Carter and Brett Carter join the distinguished ranks of scholars whose work carries forward William Riker’s legacy of combining theory and empirics to deepen our understanding of political life.

Introduction and Contribution

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) continue to deepen their decades-long authoritarian control over Turkish politics, economy, and society. Indeed, repressive tactics once reserved for Turkey’s marginalized Kurdish community have increasingly been applied to AKP’s opponents more generally, including journalists, business elites, and mayors. Key among these opponents is Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, viewed as the face of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). İmamoğlu, seen as the frontrunner to challenge Erdoğan’s presidency in 2028, was arrested in March 2025 on spurious charges of terrorism and corruption.

At the same time, Turkey’s opposition is finding ways to resist Erdoğan’s autocratization. CHP — which traces its roots to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his vision for a secular Turkish nation — learned from its disappointing loss in Turkey’s 2023 national elections. By transforming its electoral strategy for the 2024 local elections, the CHP not only bested AKP’s vote share but also won in many areas that are historically AKP strongholds, which are often populated by conservative voters. What explains the CHP’s significant local turnaround under the constraints of Turkey’s ‘electoral authoritarian’ regime? 

In “Turkey's Hard Road to Democratic Renewal,” Ayça Alemdaroğlu, Toygar Sinan Baykan, Ladin Bayurgil, and Aytuğ Şaşmaz caution against the received wisdom that broad, national-level coalitions offer the best hope of undermining authoritarian power. Such coalitions are difficult to sustain in countries like Turkey or Hungary, where authoritarian leaders control major political institutions and the public purse while muzzling their opponents and the media. Instead, the authors point to the surprising benefits of building alternatives to authoritarianism at the local level.

Argument

At first glance, the control of local governments in authoritarian political systems does not seem especially advantageous in terms of autonomy and influence. However, Turkish mayors control many of the policy domains that directly affect ordinary citizens, including transportation, sanitation, and housing. When local services and infrastructure are poor, voters may be willing to switch their partisan allegiance, even in places where the incumbent party works to distribute patronage and to propagandize them. Local governance enables opposition politicians to gain visibility and public support, as well as to demonstrate their administrative competence. 

How exactly did the CHP pull off its impressive local showing in 2024? As noted above, the opposition built a national-level coalition in 2023, fractured by ideological divisions and disputes over its presidential candidate against Erdoğan, ultimately collapsing after the election. It was no match for Erdoğan’s unified messaging around threats to Turkey’s national security — portraying Kurds at home and in Syria as threats — and on nationalist pride in Turkey’s indigenous defense industry.

In 2024, by contrast, the CHP’s campaign strategy emerged from the bottom up: it employed electoral strategists and pollsters across Turkish municipalities, conducted fieldwork in competitive areas, selected mayoral candidates who could win, created local coalitions across ideological lines, and fine-tuned its messaging around service provision. Its flexible and pragmatic strategy appealed to both Turkey’s Sunni majority as well as its minority Alevis and Kurds. Meanwhile, the AKP was highly centralized in its reliance on Erdoğan’s popularity, failing to adapt to the demands of local residents whose support it believed was guaranteed.
 

Unpacking the CHP’s Victory

To understand how the CHP won and how it consolidated its electoral gains, the authors conducted interviews with newly elected mayors and vice mayors, CHP party officials, activists, journalists, and political observers. Interviewees were selected from six municipal districts where no opposition-controlled mayor had won an election for at least two decades and where the CHP improved its vote share by five or more points between 2019 and 2024. In these traditional AKP strongholds, voters complained a great deal about the high cost of living in Erdoğan’s Turkey. At the same time, they were becoming less religiously conservative and less supportive of a “majoritarian” style of politics.
 

Image

Table 1: Six Turkish districts in brief
 

During the campaign, the CHP worked to reverse its image as a party committed to Atatürk’s “aggressive” secularism, sometimes nominating conservative Sunni candidates in otherwise divided districts. It focused not on ideology but on service delivery and other issues that appealed across ethnic and sectarian lines. Incumbent CHP mayors advised prospective mayors, creating intra-party relationships that were complemented by the work of CHP grassroots organizations. 

The authors introduce a number of the CHP’s successful mayoral candidates. Some of them were well-known national-level politicians who realized the benefits they could accrue by leaving Turkey’s toothless parliament and applying their skills to local government. Multiple mayors were of Kurdish and/or Alevi background, but they used these identities to appeal both inside and outside of their in-groups, for example, by attending Friday prayers with their Sunni constituents. One Alevi candidate gave municipal assembly list spots to conservative Sunnis and Kurds. By contrast, the AKP’s mayoral candidates — mainly nominated on the basis of their loyalty to Erdoğan — were perceived by their constituents as corrupt, aloof, and inefficient.

Challenges

Erdoğan’s opponents will likely struggle to reap the benefits of local governance, let alone to mount an effective challenge to AKP rule at the national level. These challenges will be heightened by AKP’s efforts to repress and arrest those whom it finds threatening. What’s more, CHP constituents expect not only the delivery of effective public services, but also patronage, especially public sector jobs, in exchange for their continued support. The AKP recognizes the challenge posed by its mayoral opponents and has responded by slashing municipal budgets. But the CHP is becoming more unified in the face of these common hardships posed by the AKP.

Ultimately, the growth of local-level CHP power opens up possibilities for democratic alternatives to AKP. The authors offer a novel perspective on how pragmatic local election campaigns, centered on service delivery, can serve as a means of undermining the influence of authoritarian leaders.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.