Ti Kosmos podcast
Ti Kosmos podcast
Putin & Erdogan: Spin Dictators? with Daniel Treisman
How do modern dictators operate? Why has Putin opted for old-style fear dictatorship? Is Erdogan a modern dictator? What do the two men have in common? What is the future of democracy?
Marilisa Anastasopoulou hosts Daniel Treisman, “modern” dictatorship expert and discuss how Putin and Erdogan have ruled for the last two decades and what they have in common.
Moreover, they talk about democracies, spin and fear dictatorships in the world today and what are the current trends.
Daniel Treisman, professor of political science at the university of California, has co-authored together with Sergei Guriev, the book "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century ".
In their book they argue that the dominant model of dictatorship has changed. There is a new type of dictatorship that is not so brutal and bloody and based on fear, the way Mao and Stalin ruled for example, but that is less violent, and it manipulates information and the system so that people genuinely support the leader. This intermediate modern model is called "Spin Dictatorship".
Interesting links related to this podcast:
Andrei Shleifer & Daniel Treisman: A normal country: Russia after communism (2005)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/0895330053147949
Daniel Treisman: The reverse evolution of spin dictatorship- Putin goes to war (2022)
https://re-russia.net/en/expertise/026/
Guardian video: Putin's Russia: dictator syndrome and the rise of a 'mafia state'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irzB-C9eSrQ
ABC News video: The New Tsar: How Putin Became Russia's Dictator | Foreign Correspondent
[00:00:00.650] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
So, good afternoon. We have with us Daniel Treisman, who is professor of political science at the University of California. Thank you so much for being here with us today.
[00:00:17.810] - Daniel Treisman
Sure, my pleasure.
[00:00:19.730] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
You have written many things, but you have co authored and it was released about six six months before the invasion of Russia in Ukraine, a very interesting book called "Spin Dictators the Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. You co authored it with, I don't know if it is right the pronunciation, Sergei Guriev. It is dificult to find it in libraries, in the bookstores right now. So let's start with that. What are spin dictators?
[00:00:52.430] - Daniel Treisman
So in the book, I argue that the dominant model of dictatorship has changed. If we look at the 20th theory of dictators, that comes to mind are people like Mao or Hitler or Stalin, leaders who killed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, who imprisoned millions of people in prison camps for political prisoners, and even less ideological, non totalitarian dictators in the 20th century. Many of them were extremely violent, very repressive. So people like Idi Amin in Africa or Mobutu and in Latin America, the generals in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile were responsible for thousands of deaths. We argue in the book that and we call that kind of dictator a fear dictator. We argue that the trend has been away from that kind of very brutal, bloody, overtly violent dictator to a kind of dictator who uses much less overt violence, but still manages to consolidate power much to the same extent, removing checks and balances, eliminating independent institutions, co opting or controlling directly the media. And the strategy of this new type of dictator is rather than intimidating everybody, spreading fear, to manipulate information so that people actually, genuinely support the leader. And part of this is pretending to be a democratic leader, a competent, effective leader who runs for election and is genuinely supported by the people, which sometimes is actually true.
[00:02:55.610] - Daniel Treisman
So we see this model of dictatorship, which we call spin dictatorship, really is gradually taking over from the fear model, which doesn't mean that there are no fear dictators left. Of course, there are still some horrible examples of brutal dictatorship in Syria, in North Korea, I would say in China, though, the Chinese use more modern techniques of spreading fear. So that remains, but the balance has shifted. So that if you look at the cohorts of leaders that came to power in authoritarian regimes over recent decades, we see the percentage that we would classify as spin dictators rising from about 10% in the 1970s cohort of authoritarian leaders to more than 50% in the cohort that came to power in the 2000s. So a real shift in the balance to this more sophisticated, less overtly violent, but still completely authoritarian model of controlling the population.
[00:04:09.790] - Daniel Treisman
Which is a very interesting concept, which also helps us, and we will talk about it later, to explain how Erdogan is perceived from some as a democrat, whereas he's not really a Democrat, in my opinion, and to your either, as far as I understand. But before we go to Erdogan, we will talk about the man of the day of the hour, which is, of course, Vladimir Putin. Back in 2005, you co- authored also another paper stating that Russia at the time was a normal country and it wouldn't be a threat. And from then to today, we see a tremendous change. What happened there?
[00:04:49.790] - Daniel Treisman
Yeah, well, in the early 2000s, Russia, if you looked at a whole range of different statistical indicators, quite similar to other middle income countries. So most middle income countries, if they are democratic, are flawed democracies with limits on freedom of the press, irregularities in their elections and high levels of corruption. Many problems which are just characteristic of most middle income countries, which are associated with a certain stage of development, as I saw it. And Russia at that time was perceived by many as being a unique case because of its history. It differed from all other authoritarian or imperfect democratic systems, and one could only understand it in this kind of very dark, historical frame of mind. And so the point of that article was to show with a whole lot of evidence that in fact, Russia did fit into the general patterns that governed political regimes at that time. And in that article, which I wrote with Andrei Shleifer, economist at Harvard, we did at the end recognize different possible scenarios for the future, good scenarios and bad scenarios. The scenario that worked out turned to be about the worst that we could imagine at that time, which is a real movement over the subsequent 15 years back away from what I just described as spin dictatorship.
[00:06:37.400] - Daniel Treisman
And Putin was one of the innovators in spin dictatorship, but he moved back towards really a pretty clear case of fear dictatorship in which the population is afraid and in which fear is mobilized to keep people in line. So we've seen this regression in Russia. Now, why did that happen? Well, my view is that Putin really started out with potential to go in different directions, and gradually he lost faith that the sophisticated model of manipulative dictatorship would continue to work. So it worked really very well for a long time, and perhaps it could have continued to work well. But when he came back to the Kremlin in 2012, so, if you remember, he took a break, Dmitry Medvedev, his close friend, became president for four years, he was prime minister, stepped back a little, then he returned in 2012. And at that time, mass protests broke out in Russia, basically against his rule, against falsification of elections, but against him too.
[00:07:53.876] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
The Snow Revolution
[00:07:54.020] - Daniel Treisman
And from then on, yeah, he started to introduce tougher, harsher policies, still combining it initially with a lot of spin. And I think he lost faith in his political operatives to continue to manage the system as they'd been doing quite successfully through manipulation, through working behind the scenes.
[00:08:18.090] - Daniel Treisman
He also lost confidence in his liberal economic, sort of western oriented experts who had been advising on economic policy, I think because they told him that if the regime remained corrupt, if he allowed the expropriation of assets from big business people, this would crash the market. And in fact, the Russian stock market soared even as the government was becoming more corrupt. So I think he lost faith in his experts, he lost faith in his political manipulators, and he retreated to trusting more and more in his security service, old colleagues, professionals, in basically in using fear to control the population. And he just continued on that trajectory. And then in the last five to ten years, he started engaging in this kind of belligerent external aggression, and first and foremost in Ukraine, culminating in the full scale invasion of Ukraine that we saw last year. And that continues. And this really commits him pretty much completely to the strategy of overt repression at home, along with this military aggression abroad.
[00:09:47.300] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
As far as I understand the idea is, and that goes well with the fact that in the beginning, like in 2000, we were overly optimistic. When I say we are in the west, with Turkey, with Russia, even with China, that as long as they would modernize and have more wealth, they would become more democratic, which we saw in all three cases that this is not what happened. We did see protests, as you mentioned, in 2012. We saw protest in Russia in 2017, but we don't see any protests today. How do you explain that?
[00:10:28.170] - Daniel Treisman
Very easily. It's become a very repressive environment for protest, and people don't feel the protest will accomplish much. Nevertheless, you still see very brave people going out to protest against the war in small numbers, but in this environment where basically you might as well go straight to jail. You might as well just turn yourself into the police station because you'll be arrested immediately. It suggests that there are some people who feel very strongly and are still courageous enough to do that, but so it's not surprising to me that we don't see mass protests. I think we can get a misleading impression about the level of support for the war from over generalizing, from that superficial reality. And in fact, I think there is support for the war in Russia among many people, but it's a kind of conditional, lukewarm support for the war. I think it's it's much more a matter of people supporting their own side in the war than supporting the war itself. So right on the eve of Putin's invasion, only 9% of Russians in opinion polls said that they were in favor of sending troops to fight in Ukraine.
[00:11:53.190] - Daniel Treisman
And these days, 77% say, in credible polls, that they support the war, but only 45%, if I remember right, say they want the war to continue 50% would prefer to see peace negotiations. So it's obviously very difficult in a highly repressive regime and in a situation of war to correctly assess the state of public opinion. But I think it's certainly not as homogeneously supportive of the war as we might think, just looking at the surface.
[00:12:42.390] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
So could we argue in a way also, that because of the measures that Putin has taken in order to suppress any disagreement with what he's doing on that war, that from a spin dictator, slowly or fast he goes into a more traditional dictator? I mean, does it work like that?
[00:13:05.760] - Daniel Treisman
Absolutely. When we wrote the book, when we first wrote the book, which was we gave the manuscript into the printer in early 2021, if I remember right, we already said that Putin had moved and he was kind of on the edge of spin and fear. In the new preface to the paperback edition, we discuss how he then moved fully into the fear category, fear dictatorship category. And I've written about this in an article in Foreign Affairs, which looks at how I see the process of evolution in Putin's worldview, in his entourage and in his style of rule. So, yes, I think and it's very clear on it.
[00:13:54.190] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
It's a very good article, I've read the article. I liked it a lot. You also mentioned in your writings that normally spin dictators don't, and I did mention in the beginning that the book was out six months before the invasion for that purpose, that spin dictators in general don't go into such type of aggressive foreign policy. So Putin is, let's say, an exception. And I would like now to see how Erdogan fits in that picture .For us in Europe, because you're in the US, it's sometimes frustrating that many countries say Turkey is a democracy because they have elections. See what happened in the municipal elections, the opposition won. Nonetheless, they have all these violations of human rights and so on and so forth, and in a kind of aggressive rhetoric when it comes to foreign affairs, to say the least. How would you portray Erdogan? And if you could make a comparison of Erdogan and Putin, if you think that's worth doing it.
[00:15:09.650] - Daniel Treisman
Sure. So it's not surprising that we have difficulty classifying some of these regimes, because the goal of spin dictators is to appear to be democratic leaders, to create the image of democracy. Erdogan, I would say, started out as a spin dictator, or you could even say that he started out quite democratic in the very early years, evolved into a spin dictator, gradually consolidating power, marginalizing opposition, reducing the resources available to opposition. But we think that really, in the last 5-10 years, especially since the failed coup in 2016, he's reached more directly for the levers of fear dictators. He's imprisoned tens of thousands of people on political grounds. He's tried to intimidate, at least part of the population, rather than to convince them that he's actually a democrat doing a good job. So we see him as backsliding from spin dictatorship to something closer to fear dictatorship. And there's been three interesting cases, and here I get to the comparison with Putin. There have been three interesting cases of people who started out, or countries that started out, cases of spin dictatorship, which have, under various pressures, reverted to fear dictatorship, basically because the incumbents thought that they could no longer, that the techniques of spin dictatorship were no longer working.
[00:17:02.330] - Daniel Treisman
And so one of those we already discussed is Putin. He started out as spin dictator, he has now moved back to fear dictatorship. But before Putin, there was Erdogan, whose tactics, whose modus operandi changed over the years. And the third case that I'm thinking of is Venezuela, where we had Hugo Chávez, who was a spin dictator on the left, using his media appearances, acting a very democratic politician, but in practice, gathering up control of the various institutions, packing the courts, neutralizing opposition in the parliament. So Chávez was replaced by Nicolás Maduro when Chávez died, of course. And Maduro's techniques are much more overtly repressive. In fact, he's a classic fear dictator at this point, still using a few techniques from spin, but very much invested in repression. So this has happened in a number of cases, and in part that may be associated with the period of turbulence and unease and plateauing in the global economy. I mean, our argument is that as economic development, modernization spreads, and as it starts to create these global networks of human rights organizations, global media and so on, that this creates an environment which is much more conducive, first of all to democracy, but barring that, to more sophisticated models of dictatorship.
[00:18:50.020] - Daniel Treisman
Well, that kind of optimistic, positive development over a number of decades has hit some bumps, let's say has hit turbulence. And although we don't yet see a clear trend towards, I would say, deglobalization or breakdown in the international order, there are certainly threats to that. And so we see some spin dictators, in part responding to the modernization in their own societies, which makes their job much harder by cracking down with traditional tools of dictatorship because they're not sophisticated and skilled enough to continue to manage things in the more ultimately effective modern way. So I think Erdogan and Putin are quite similar in that regard. They started out with a great understanding and sense for how to project themselves as democratic politicians, how to get what they wanted without appearing to be as authoritarian as they were. But they've both kind of reached the limit. So at least they felt they were reaching the limits of that model. And they've both reverted to a style of politics which is quite different from how they started.
[00:20:23.350] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
So to kind of wrap it up and conclude it due to modernization, due to globalization, due to more flow of information, better economy, then the spin dictators cannot manage let's say, to handle their grip the way they want. So they have to move to a more hard control, to a harder control of their people. But if we would look it up from a different angle, I mean, spin dictators don't come from democracies because for us in Europe and you in the US democracy would be the ideal. But this narrative that with globalization they would become democracies, we didn't see that. We went through this transition of spin dictatorships and now we're going back to full, let's say, dictatorship. So in a way, spin dictatorships, someone could argue, is a kind of good thing to have compared to the alternatives in these countries.
[00:21:28.600] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
Could you argue that?
[00:21:31.470] - Daniel Treisman
It's definitely better than authoritarian regimes which kill millions of people? There's no question. But I would say what's happened over the last, say, 50 years is we had an incredible increase in democracies. This is what's often called the third wave. So since the 1970s, huge increase in the share of democracies around the world. So from about 25% to more than 50% of countries. Now, more recently, many people have been talking about backsliding, about a crisis or a recession of democracy. And we've seen a bit of that, but we haven't seen a huge decrease in the proportion of democracies, a few percentage points at this point. So basically we had this huge rise. Then we had a plateau and slight decrease. Now, in the context of that, spin dictatorship becomes an attractive model for authoritarian leaders who see that the world around them is moving towards democracy, or at least much more than in any previous era, and who see the economic power and the kind of the global influence of the democratic world increasing. So in Africa, many countries wanted aid from the west, and that aid became a bit more conditioned on at least superficial democracy, from the 1990s on.
[00:23:03.290] - Daniel Treisman
In other parts of the world, countries recognized that economic success relied on, depended on integrating into the global economy. And it was much easier to do that if you were respectable in the west, if you were invited to Davos and taken seriously by Western leaders. So that was the environment in which spin dictatorship became an attractive model. Now we're in this uncertain moment in the world economy and in the international system where some people are seeing tectonic plates shifting and wondering if the order that's basically survived and developed since 1945 is going to crumble. I think dictators are questioning their strategies and some are becoming harsher. Not all, I should say. There's still quite a lot of spin dictators who are still using spin dictatorship. Think about Orban in Hungary. Think about various leaders in Latin America, Tokayev in Kazakhstan who took over from Nazarbayev. Nazarbayev was another early spin dictator. So there's still a lot of and of course, I should mention the governments of Singapore, which are extremely effective at maintaining control while keeping institutions that look pretty democratic, at least from a certain distance. So that model still continues, but it's a moment of uncertainty.
[00:24:45.750] - Daniel Treisman
And in the cases where authoritarian leaders are coming under a lot of pressure, they are backsliding. Spin dictatorship is a kind of intermediate form. So as the world develops economically, as societies modernize, fear, dictatorship becomes much more costly. And that's a point which is important to emphasize. So we see Russia, we see Turkey, we see Venezuela. None of them is doing particularly well economically for various reasons, but in part because they've chosen a model of rule which makes economic development much harder. So there's a big cost to dominating society through fear, and it's largely the economic cost of failure in a global economy that's increasingly based on knowledge and services, new kinds of goods. So the countries that have slid backwards into harsher authoritarianism do that as a big cost, as a last resort, essentially, when they think there's no alternative. So spin dictatorship is this intermediate model, which can work for a while in more modern societies. Eventually, the country either has to democratize more, or sometimes it'll revert back. That probably isn't a stable option for that long, indefinitely, because of the economic collapse that it often brings about, or at least the severe crisis. But to an incumbent, at a certain moment, it may still look like the best hope of surviving.
[00:26:36.910] - Marilisa Anastasopoulou
And since I live in Greece, we have the one neighbor not so close, Putin, that has gone to the other way. We have elections in Turkey, hoping that democracy will prevail as much as possible. And it was very, very interesting what you said, and I will strongly advise everyone to read the book and your articles, and I thank you so much for your time to be with us today.
[00:27:04.070] - Daniel Treisman
Thank you very much.