Ep. 6: Autocracies in the information age

The world has been adjusting to the information age for the last 50 years now. And so have its autocracies, according to our guest today. Daniel Treisman, political scientist at UCLA, says that illiberal leaders are building modern authoritarian regimes with a new set of tools to keep themselves in power. In the Fall 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Treisman and his coauthor Sergei Guriev described these so-called informational autocrats, which no longer terrorize their citizens like traditional autocrats—if they can avoid it. Instead, these dictators suppress widespread knowledge of their own incompetence and criminal activity by manipulating major media outlets, disguising themselves as democracies, and hiding their violence. In such an atmosphere, unflattering stories about leaders tend not to reach the general public. Professor Treisman recently spoke with the AEA’s Tyler Smith about how informational autocrats retain their power, why they had to adapt, and how new coalitions may be able to fight back.