Niccolo Machiavelli wrote centuries ago in The Prince that a political leader must “be a great pretender and dissembler” because “men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”
For centuries, dictators have sought to manipulate their subjects, the better to subjugate them. But as Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman persuasively argue in Spin Dictators, their absorbing, meticulous study of the evolution of authoritarianism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, craft and deception have in recent decades supplanted fear and terror as the defining characteristics of today’s autocratic rulers.
“Instead of terrorizing citizens,” they posit, “a skillful ruler can control them by reshaping their beliefs about the world. He can fool people into compliance and even enthusiastic approval.” The authors themselves are no strangers to dictatorial machinations. Guriev, an economist at Paris’s prestigious Sciences Po, fled Russia in 2013 after Kremlin agents, miffed about his study of a crooked prosecution of Vladimir Putin’s chief rival, paid him a visit. Treisman, a UCLA political scientist, previously served in various positions in Russia.
The spin dictator playbook, they contend, requires autocrats to seek popular approval, consolidate power, and pretend to be democratic. While these tactics have characterized almost all authoritarians, they are the sine qua non of the contemporary model. More precisely, Guriev and Treisman define a spin dictator as someone who governs a nondemocratic country where national elections are held allowing at least one opposition party to run, where at least a few media outlets criticize the government, where fewer than 10 state political killings occur annually, and where fewer than 1,000 political prisoners are detained each year.
The forerunner for today’s spin dictators was Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who quelled serious unrest in the 1950s, spurred astronomical economic growth, and retained broad popularity throughout his reign. Through tactics such as arresting dissidents for nonpolitical crimes, deploying revolving-door detention, and accusing political opponents of violence, Lee forged an innovative authoritarian mold.
Lee’s proteges, including Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, built on these methods and developed new propaganda tactics, projecting an image of competence instead of fear, softening ideological edges, cultivating celebrity rather than a cult of personality, and employing “sensible censorship,” i.e. allowing a limited number of media outlets to express objective criticism of the regime. Spin dictators seek to persuade, not merely to intimidate, even if the bounds of persuasion are narrowly drawn.
They also orchestrate elaborate democratic charades producing comfortable, but not absurd, margins of victory. The authors demonstrate numerically (if disconcertingly) how “fraud reassures voters that the ‘right’ candidate won.” Abroad, spin dictators co-opt international institutions (such as Interpol), establish fake nongovernmental organizations that carry their water, share best practices with like-minded despots, fund think tanks, and shower former Western leaders (such as Germany’s Gerhard Schroder) with lucrative board seats on state-owned enterprises. And yet spin dictators go to war far less frequently than fear dictators: one dispute every eight years for the former, compared to one every three for the latter.
So, when and why did terrormongering autocrats transmute to manipulative ones? Guriev and Treisman flag the 1990s as the turning point when a “modernization cocktail” — the emergence of postindustrial society, the rise of globalization, and the elevation of the liberal international order — began to irrigate the world. As manufacturing gave way to services, and especially the information economy, global and domestic markets prized ever higher levels of education, which fundamentally conflicted with the type of brutal, top-down suppression of knowledge favored by fear dictators. Then, too, global economic integration and communications rendered thoroughgoing censorship and other forms of isolation nearly impossible. Finally, the increasing salience of global conventions and nongovernmental organizations curbed the prevalence of authoritarian violence; “We have to carry out our own French Revolution,” lamented the Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo, “with Amnesty International peering over our shoulder.”
Consider, conversely, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February: Putin’s spin dictatorship reverted to its imperial, aggressive, violent Soviet form, and in response, it suffered the consequences that had crippled its predecessor. The civilized world repaid Putin’s brazenness by deploying the modernization cocktail tools of information bombardment, isolation from the global economic system in the form of the SWIFT interbanking system, global denunciation in trans- and non-governmental forums, and the bolstering of the liberal order, including the revitalization of NATO. A similar fate might await China, which Guriev and Treisman describe as a hybrid fear/spin dictatorship, were it to attempt its long-coveted seizure of Taiwan.
What, then, can the liberal democratic world do to curtail the influence of the authoritarian propagandists? The authors encourage the adoption of what they call “adversarial engagement”: “The West should use the leverage of an interconnected world to defend its interests and nudge dictatorships toward free government.” This will require careful monitoring of spin dictatorships, enhanced counterintelligence, intensified global modernization, and a restoration of the resilience of our own systems: in short, pace Machiavelli, we must forcefully uncover deception. Perhaps most importantly, they urge the creation of “an alliance of liberal democracies to defend democracy.” All far easier said than done, of course. But in diagnosing a critical problem and proposing a prophylactic, Guriev and Treisman have performed a great service to the field of geopolitics.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
