Given your expertise on democratic backsliding, I hope you can provide a silver lining here Laura 🤓 No pressure..but go:

Perhaps next time Western media companies won’t swallow Saudi propaganda so easily and gleefully…

I see some bullshit stadium in the sky has been announced now…

Every example I used in this article from April was ICE. Not only is it possible to have two secret police forces, many authoritarian regimes do.

theconversation.com/how-ice-is-b...

Very much looking forward to that book! I suspect it will be great for my course material

I hereby challenge Alex Dukalskis to a competition: be the first person to published an article on the historical origins of Trump’s authoritarian model*

* article must be peer-reviewed

More seriously, I have wondered whether Trump observed some dictators from afar in his 20s and has since thought ‘this is how you do it.’ It actually explains a lot when you try to make sense of his actions, like transporting a 1960s dictator to rule in 2025…

🔼 Solid hypothesis

Hmmm I am looking at 1960s Central Africa as the relevant reference point 😁

Congratulations!

Milan Svolik and I are working on a similar project, albeit based on Singapore. We are likewise investigating whether people trade-off democracy (and ignore democratic abuses) for effective governance, which the PAP has long claimed as its trademark.

Be great to chat sometime!

Huge dumb orange outlier

Yes, you can count them on two hands. Although there is a large literature on ousting autocratic leaders, which obviously overlaps

I am submitting a grant app on the “autocrat’s playbook.” Part of its appeal (I hope), is that there are not many practical solutions out there to resisting backsliding

I dare you to try get “loose cannon” into a journal article…