Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science and Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers at Barnard College, Columbia University. Alexander Dukalskis associate professor in the School of Politics & International Relations at University College Dublin. They are the authors of the recent book Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
There was an assumption that influence could only run one direction… but influence could run the other direction as well.
Alexander Cooley
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- Liberalism, Not Democracy – 3:18
- The Autocratic Axis – 15:01
- Profits Over Principles – 28:20
- What Comes After Liberalism? – 38:47
Introduction
Today’s guests are Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis. They are the authors of the recent book Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics. Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science and Vice Provost for Research and Academic Centers at Barnard College, Columbia University. Alexander Dukalskis associate professor in the School of Politics & International Relations at University College Dublin.
If you’ve been listening since the beginning, you might remember Alex Cooley from the fourth episode where I interviewed him and Dan Nexon. That interview focused on their book Exit from Hegemony. Those who follow Alex Cooley’s work recognize some consistent themes. He focuses on the influence of authoritarian regimes on the international order, the changing role of America in international relations, and global corruption and its effects on regimes.
Their new book, Dictating the Agenda, explores how authoritarian states have repurposed institutions of the liberal international order for illiberal ends. For a long time, most expected engagement with autocratic regimes would make them more democratic. Few considered it might make democracies susceptible to illiberal purposes.
Now I want to be very careful here because my own feelings on these ideas are mixed. For starters, I find it uncomfortable to blame the state of self-governance on anyone but ourselves. I also think this line of thought leads to a hawkish foreign policy. But something real is going on which is why I continue having conversations with people like Christopher Walker, Larry Diamond, and this conversation with Alex Cooley and Alex Dukalskis.
My challenge for you is to consider how much authoritarian governments can influence democracies. What do you think is the right reaction or policy response? Do you want democracies to become more engaged internationally or less engaged?
If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis…
Podcast Transcript
jmk: Alex Cooley and Alex Dukalskis, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Alexander Dukalskis: Thanks for having us.
Alexander Cooley: It’s great to be here.
jmk: Well, Alex C., big fan of a lot of your work. I’ve been reading it for a long time. Alex D., I’ve read a couple of your pieces in Journal of Democracy and other places, so I’m excited to have both of you on.
I was enthralled to see your new book, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics. One of the things in the book that really struck me was that when we think about the authoritarian resurgence and we think about dictators having greater impact on the world today, it’s usually described as a threat to democracy.
But the sense that I got from your book was that it’s more of a threat to liberalism than it is a threat to democracy, per se. And that’s a point that’s been made by other people before. Francis Fukuyama, in his most recent book, described the global threat to democracy as more of a threat to liberalism than democracy, but I’d like to ask you if that’s how you see it.
So do you see this as more of a threat to liberalism or democracy?
Alexander Cooley: Yeah. Thanks so much, Justin. It’s a pleasure to be on the show, and I think your observation is really astute. Also, our perspective, I think, is driven more by the global governance side of things. So inasmuch as democracy is informing domestic politics and liberal principles are informing these institutions and norms in global governance, I would say your observation is correct.
A lot of what we’re doing is uncovering how the liberal principles, norms, procedures, plumbing that have informed many areas of global governance have changed over the last 10, 15 years, oftentimes as the result of the deliberate replumbing by authoritarians, oftentimes indirectly as a result of new kinds of market pressures coming into arenas like consumer boycotts or professional sports leagues.
So I think it is about liberalism, but it also reflects the international level that we’re looking at, where I think liberalism’s a more apt characteristic than direct democracy per se in a lot of these institutions.
jmk: Well, Alex D., let me ask you on that. Do you feel that threats to liberalism are also threats to democracy, or is liberalism and democracy something that we can really disentangle, particularly when we think about it at the global context?
Alexander Dukalskis: Yeah, I mean, I think what some observers do is look at the rise of authoritarian powers, the rise of global authoritarianism, and the thing they’re concerned with is, are there more authoritarian states being made? In other words, is a democracy being subverted? And that’s certainly an extreme outcome of the growth of authoritarianism globally.
But another way to think about it is that the growth of authoritarian powers, their increased influence in global governance areas and in transnational politics, changes what we talk about, changes the way we do things. Not so much necessarily with the extreme outcome that we’re all going to become living in authoritarian states, but that we are doing things differently even as democratic actors because of the rise of authoritarian powers.
There’s a lot of research about this in areas that are explicitly political, international organizations or regional organizations. But one of the points we tried to make in the book is that we’re also seeing this now in areas that are not explicitly thought of as political.
Our own industry of higher education, for example — we’ve seen a lot of changes because of universities’ interactions with authoritarian powers. Areas like sports and consumer behavior and media, these domains are being changed because of the rise of authoritarian power and authoritarian financing in ways that change what we talk about and how we do things without necessarily a full regime transition, if you like, from democracy to authoritarianism in a given state.
jmk: Well, you’ve written quite a bit on China. What I’d like to understand, though, is a country like China and a country like Russia or Iran seem to have very different types of authoritarianism that they want to impose on the world. Do the different types of authoritarianism actually matter, or is it purely the fact that it’s anti-liberal that really matters more?
Because I don’t see China getting into sports washing, but I do see them getting into global media. Is it a purely authoritarian push, or are there different agendas from each one of these autocratic actors?
Alexander Dukalskis: Yeah. So I think one way to think about it is from the point of view of an authoritarian state or a dictatorship, what kinds of things will an authoritarian leader find threatening?
And you can think about threats coming from the people, the masses. You can think about threats coming from other elites. You can also think about threats coming from the outside. And those threats coming from the outside, when it comes to liberalism, are things like international human rights groups, free media flows, democracy promotion programs.
Why is that? Well, because human rights and democracy and the bundle of liberal rights that accompanies it is threatening to authoritarians because they rely on a system that necessitates lack of accountability, lack of transparency, no free and fair elections. And so they think of liberalism as a threat to their own rule.
So this question of what ties all these disparate authoritarian states together is a shared threat perception about liberalism. In February 2022, Russia and China agreed to their so-called no-limits friendship. And of course, there are limits to any good friendship. A lot of commentators were quick to say, “Oh, well, there actually are limits and contradictions,” and of course there are. But I think a lot of people overlooked that there were genuine affinities and genuine areas of cooperation that are deeper and more substantive than I think a lot of observers gave them credit for.
Alexander Cooley: Yeah, and I think this is where the Russian case is particularly interesting because it shows, certainly on the global media and information disinformation propaganda front, a near obsession with global liberalism. So Russian propaganda and the Russian global information ecosystem — it’s not set up, for the most part, to promote positive images of Russia and Russian foreign policy.
It’s set up to spotlight the inherent contradictions, they would argue, that liberalism has — the hypocrisy, the double standards, the imperialism dressed as multilateral kinds of norms. All of these aspects of the international order that Russian foreign policy has been concerned with for over twenty years, these are the recurring themes that you see in news coverage in Latin America, for instance.
And that remains relatively constant. Even through the last year, year and a half of global political turmoil at a less than liberal new US president, you see this fixation that Moscow has in its information ecosystem on targeting liberalism. At the same time, Russia has also expanded all of these extraterritorial laws.
So foreign agent laws, the undesirable organization laws — it now targets individuals as well as organizations, right? It attempts to increase its extraterritorial repressive legal infrastructure well beyond its border. So these are both authoritarian mechanisms, but their targets, I would say, are different but complementary.
jmk: So the term that you use in the book is authoritarian snapback, and when I hear scholars talk about authoritarians having greater influence in the world, there’s very much a glass-half-empty sense where the way that we’re thinking about it is that authoritarianism is on the rise, liberalism is on the decline, things are moving in the wrong direction.
However, it gives the impression that the authoritarians are really in control of the moment. But the more I think about this term, authoritarian snapback, it comes across to me as people who are cornered and people who are desperate, and maybe that’s even the reason why authoritarians look like they’re cooperating so much — because if they thought that they were in control, they probably would have more differences between each other.
But I’m getting the sense that maybe we’re being too pessimistic in terms of the situation, and that the reason why authoritarians are snapping back and they’re working in concert has more to do with the fact that liberalism has been so dominant and so in control for so many years that this is really the only response that they can have to be able to respond to liberalism as autocrats.
Alexander Cooley: Yeah, that’s a really interesting and provocative and important point. I would say certainly the dominance of the unipolar moment, the overlapping of US power politics, hegemony, the Washington Consensus, right? Economic transformation, the dominance of the US controlling these institutions of global governance and global media outlets.
The US had control of everything in the 1990s and the 2000s, and so in some ways, I think you’re right. The playbook or pushback tactics that comprise authoritarian snapback is a kind of a reaction to that. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a really interesting thinker at a prominent liberal foundation who lamented our use of the word authoritarian snapback and playbook, and he was making the point this just seems too deliberate and concerted, and authoritarians are not as much in control.
They’re more reactive than you give credit for. And I actually think that was probably more the case in the mid-2010s than it is now, because this whole menu of tactics that we’ve talked about — stigmatization, reframing the agenda, going on the offense — a lot of these have proven to be highly effective.
And so whether this was originally intended or in concert or sort of cooperation out of pragmatism or convenience, I think there has been a kind of efficacious momentum that has gathered, especially since the pandemic, where you’re seeing these tactics and tools deployed because they just seem to work now.
And so I think we have to be careful a little bit about what era we’re talking about. But I take your point that none of this would have been rolled out in the way that it was if you weren’t concerned about where it stands in the infrastructure of advocacy and the success that liberal advocacy had in the 1990s and the 2000s. You wouldn’t have had to stigmatize a little NGO pushing out reports about cotton or labor activism or all these things otherwise.
jmk: Yeah. And to double down on the point you just made, that there’s a lot more coordination nowadays, it’s not just that there’s authoritarian learning that’s happening, because that’s been happening for a while, where you’ve had autocrats copying the same strategies. The Russian NGO law is a perfect example, where you have countries copying what Russia did, and other countries looking at other autocrats that have done things successfully and saying, “Well, how can I do that, too?”
So they don’t have to talk to each other. They can just look at successful attempts and then replicate those within their own country. What is surprising is how much direct coordination and collaboration is happening right now on the international level between countries that we would not expect coordination and collaboration with.
For instance, we can think about Iran supplying drones to Russia. We can think about Russia sending ships over to Venezuela to protect their oil. I mean, these are countries that in a previous era, like the Cold War, would not have worked together because they would have been too far on opposite poles from each other.
It would have been the left and the right trying to cooperate. That’s not how things really worked. I mean, Venezuela being socialist and Iran being a theocracy, these countries wouldn’t have been on the same axis, but it feels like there is more of an autocratic axis that seems to be coordinating more than ever before, not just in terms of ideas, but actually in terms of resources between each other.
Alexander Cooley: Yeah. We talk a lot about the transactionalism of the new foreign policy of this administration in the US, and what a break it is from the past, but I think transactional politics has always characterized authoritarian coordination, and we see that now.
It’s a strange critique to say that, well, because these countries have ideological differences or geographical differences or don’t necessarily line up on two or three global issues, that at some point this is going to be precarious and they’re going to clash.
No, there’s no evidence for that. That’s us bringing in our assumptions. I would say on the Russian case, there’s an interesting development now where it’s precisely because Putin seems to have backed a number of allied administrations that have fallen — Maduro being one of them, but also Syria, Mali — that you’re seeing actually some bloggers from the right saying, “You know, you’ve spent all this money on global Russia, and we can’t even rig an election in Moldova.
We can’t even take over Odessa.” So in some ways, the direct support is also the weakest. The pragmatic overlap in coordination is really, really key, and it always struck me as a strange argument that somehow this is not going to be enduring — or, yes, okay, there’s a strategic agreement between Iran and Russia, but it’s not a real defense agreement.
We create these really high thresholds for when something is supposed to be judged as meaningful, which I think itself brings in our own liberal biases that’s drawn from the experiences of NATO and other liberal institutions.
Alexander Dukalskis: I would add that there’s an emblematic moment, September of last year, in which we saw this cooperation captured in one photograph, and this is the meeting in Beijing between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, along with 20 or 30 other leaders of mostly illiberal states.
The symbolism being that these three figures are leading the other countries, and of course, that’s undergirded by real substantial cooperation — not just watching and learning, but North Korea supplying actual troops to Russia in its assault on Ukraine, and of course, North Korea receiving technological support in return, as well as battlefield experience.
China and Russia cooperating with one another, not only economically, but in the information space, particularly social media presence, and trying to learn and cooperate with Russia in that regard. So there’s a lot of real substantial cooperation behind that image that was very intentionally, I think, designed to promote an image of unity and leadership of authoritarian rulers.
jmk: So one of the strong cases that you make in the book as to why authoritarians have more influence today than in the past was that the share of global GDP of authoritarians has increased dramatically from 1991 to today. I’d like to know if that’s really just isolated to China’s rise and China’s influence.
And if so, if that means that really when we’re thinking about the authoritarian resurgence, we’re really just thinking about China and China’s ability to have greater influence on the world. Or if we should be thinking beyond China to a lot more middle powers — not just Russia, but even Iran, Turkey, and others that are autocratic but don’t quite have the same influence that a dominant country like China has, having gone very much from relatively small to an enormous amount of global GDP, and an enormous amount of military power and everything else over the last few decades.
Alexander Dukalskis: Yeah. So as you note in the book, we create this measure of economic dominance of liberal democracies versus authoritarian states, and we note that in 1991, liberal democracies had the vast majority of the world’s GDP. Authoritarian states had only four percent. And in 2021, thirty years later, the most liberal democratic states had fifty-nine percent of global GDP, and the most illiberal, the most authoritarian states had twenty-six percent.
And I looked at the numbers again, the most recent numbers available for 2024, and the story’s pretty much the same, with one interesting caveat, which I can come back to later. But the question about whether this is really just all about China is an interesting one. And of course, China in this story, and in really any story about global authoritarianism, is first unequals.
I don’t think there’s any question about that — of course, the most populous and wealthiest authoritarian state in the world. So it has outsized influence. But what we also think is that China’s rise creates a more enabling environment for other authoritarian states, and that it’s not just about China as one singular authoritarian state, but it’s about a network.
They themselves call it the like-minded group — thirty-five or forty countries that share similar views on global governance, share similar views on the way international relations ought to look. And so it’s China, yes, but as you noted, it’s also all these other states that have similar views about the way things ought to operate.
To your point, there are a number of states that are at the bottom of the league tables of democracy — in other words, very authoritarian — and the top of the league tables of economic power. So yes, it’s China, it’s also Russia, it’s Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States that have the financial firepower to basically influence global politics.
Alexander Cooley: It might be useful to think about which of these economic vectors plays an outsized role in which issue and domain.
China is extremely important across all of these dimensions. Its importance in terms of its consumer market and what that means for really Western corporates as well as Western organizations is difficult to exaggerate. When you look at, say, the expansion of the National Basketball Association, the revenue that is associated with media rights there, the individual player sponsorship contracts that they get for rights in China — the Chinese consumer market just can’t be overlooked, and this is why the reverse boycotts that we talk about have also become really effective.
That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect is, as a middling authoritarian or autocratizing country, do you now have enough resources to start pushing these vectors of influence that affect perceptions of the country globally? And that involves hiring lobbyists both in Brussels and Washington, developing your own global media infrastructure.
And it’s no coincidence that the last fifteen years we see all of these countries now with global media outlets. It’s a sound investment. You don’t have to have Chinese GDP to do that. So I think there are certain things that are driven by the internal markets that play an outsized global importance, but then there’s also just some minimal threshold of capacity that many of these autocracies have now to present themselves in a manner that’s effective — and that really complicates, I would say, the global governance ecosystem from the 1990s, when it was really just the liberal order states or the liberal cartel states who were presenting themselves as movers.
jmk: So right now we’re talking about the growth of autocratic states in terms of their economies. But the flip side to this is the lack of growth from Western democracies. And something that always surprises me when I look at the numbers, and this is brought up by Fareed Zakaria frequently on his program, the United States’ share of nominal GDP around the world hasn’t really changed that much since 1991.
It’s shocking because we always talk about the decline of the United States when we’re talking about the decline of the West. But it feels like the decline, when we look at the numbers, seems to be telling a story more about the decline of the influence of Europe, Japan, most of our allies. When we think about the increased influence of autocratic nations compared to democracies, is it really about a failure of United States power, or is it a slippage of the power of our allies?
Alexander Cooley: Yeah, that’s also a really great question, Justin. I would say yes, it is absolutely true that in terms of just share of global GDP and the resilience of the American market, it continues to defy expectations. And that’s true also of the current moment, through tariffs, through a perceived global impending oil shock that hasn’t happened yet.
You see this resilience. In part, that is a reflection of the American ecosystem, how adaptable it is to the adoption of new technologies, new businesses, our robust capital markets, our ability to incubate and nurture entrepreneurship. The cautionary pushback I would put to that is twofold.
One is, I wonder whether in this latest round now of technological innovation, in which it is the US and China on the frontier of AI models, the commitments themselves by a lot of these enterprises to liberal principles frankly appear to be up in the air. And I think this is one of the real concerns — that this kind of nexus that we had, about the private sector being represented by the federal government and having its interests projected into global standards, global regulation, global governance.
Pharmaceuticals is a great example from the 1990s and the 2000s, as they wrote intellectual property into the actual WTO founding act, which was like a trade act. It wasn’t about IP. But now a lot of these companies are doing this themselves. And so that question, that commitment to these global governance standards overall, I would argue, is unproven.
The other part of this is — we are seeing not so much the waning of American economic power, but the deinstitutionalization, right? This is something Dan Nexon and I have also written about, of the components of US foreign policy projection that would have a role in global governance, in setting standards, in advocating for liberal principles, even when they couldn’t pass the ratifications of institutions like the ICC, for instance.
There was not this kind of hostility to them. And a commitment, I think, also to liberal journalism standards around the world, which is quite important. So in terms of raw power, economic power, you’re absolutely right, but we don’t know how the private sector at this moment, how vigorously it’s going to champion these kinds of liberal democratic values overseas.
And we’ve seen a kind of institutional dismantling that’s going to be extremely difficult to reinstate, if it’s possible even at all.
jmk: That’s actually an interesting point because what you’re saying is even though many multinational corporations are founded in the United States, headquartered in the United States, have many operations in the United States, because they’re independent organizations, they are by nature not necessarily going to instill liberal values.
They have their own sets of values that are being utilized. And the fact that they have to trade and engage multinationally, including with these autocratic countries, it does raise questions of whether or not they’re going to be a force for liberalism or whether or not they’re going to be a force for illiberalism.
And what we do know is that many of the companies over in China are so tangled within the Chinese government. Many of them are state-owned corporations. Others have leaders within them who are required to be members of the Chinese Communist Party. Many of those corporations just de facto have illiberal intentions.
So the American companies can be somewhat suspect, while some of these companies over in autocratic countries, we know exactly what their intentions are. Oftentimes, they’re illiberal by nature, and that changes how much firepower we actually have as Western democracies.
Alexander Cooley: Yeah. So I would say all of these things are connected.
If you have the gradual dismantling of this advocacy infrastructure that we talk about, this liberal advocacy, watchdogs monitoring — whether it’s labor standards or green standards, role of women in the workplace, whatever the issues happen to be — when you have a systematic dismantling of this, as well as the anti-corruption framework that’s happening now, we’ve just gotten rid of our own beneficial ownership registry here, and we narrowly redefined the FCPA to a very small particular set of cases, there is less scrutiny of what these American multinational companies are doing overseas.
Add to that the changing architecture of media and a lot of these traditional spotlight effects. Deborah Spar, former Barnard president, wrote this really interesting book in the late 1990s, 2000s, Spotlight and the Bottom Line, and it was a kind of a classic global liberalism piece saying that a lot of companies comply with liberal standards not because they actually mean it or that they were good people.
It’s because the spotlight effect is so instantaneous, in what she perceived to be the globalization moment, that the adverse effect on share price, on reputation, on corporate governance is so high that a lot of companies fall in line on these issues. And I think the concern is that infrastructure is severely being eroded.
Alexander Dukalskis: Sure. So what we’ve seen time and again is that whatever companies or institutions say when they enter China about their intentions to promote liberal principles or liberalism, when those principles or those intentions collide with the ability to do business or to make profit, more often than not, the principles lose and profit wins.
You saw this pretty powerfully, I would say, surrounding consumer boycotts related to forced labor in the cotton industry in Xinjiang between around 2017 and 2022 or so. Basically, there were a lot of credible allegations of forced labor in the cotton industry there, a huge cotton industry globally. And a number of companies made statements that they were not going to source cotton from Xinjiang.
What ultimately happened is that the Chinese market, spurred on by nationalist social media commentators and eventually the party state itself, used the Chinese market as a cudgel to tell those companies, “Either you apologize or you lose access to the Chinese market.” And almost all of them folded, almost instantly, and issued groveling apologies saying that Xinjiang cotton’s amazing, and we don’t want to hurt the feelings of our Chinese consumers.
The ones that didn’t — H&M stands out as one that tried to push back a little bit or at least maneuver around some of those pressures — was punished. It was taken off of mapping software on Chinese mapping apps. There were protests outside its stores and so on and so forth. And so the lesson that a lot of companies take when there are these kinds of events is that they need to stay on the good side of the Chinese authorities and the Chinese nationalistic social media commentator class.
Alexander Cooley: Yeah. I think overall, one of the messages that we have in our book is that the general argument we had across fields at the height of liberalism, that engagement with authoritarians is positive, it’s productive, it’s constructive. We will engage in the areas of higher ed, of media, of norms, of standards.
And it wasn’t an unreasonable argument at the time, but it really failed to anticipate the sunk cost dynamic that a lot of liberal actors, whether they’re foundations, universities, advocacy groups, journalists, or even private sector companies, are faced with at a decision-making point.
Either change the parameters and the scope of what you’re doing and stop doing certain things, or leave. That decision’s pretty rational. And so we failed, I think, collectively, to understand that engagement could also lead to that. We just wanted to wish it away and think it was all about norm diffusion.
It was about efficacious authority. We’re just better at doing stuff. You’ll learn from us. And as it turned out, maybe there were some successes in terms of engagement, but a lot of what we’re looking at is this kind of reinscription of the captive liberal actor within an autocratic society and how that changes their own behavior and, frankly, their mission.
Alexander Dukalskis: There was an assumption that influence could only run one direction, and we failed to realize that not only could that influence be blocked or be parried, but that the influence could run the other direction as well.
jmk: Yeah, one example that always comes to my mind as somebody who lives in Indiana and is surrounded by basketball fans is what happened when Daryl Morey sent out that tweet years ago about standing with the people of Hong Kong, and many voices within the NBA turned against him.
A lot of people were not happy about it. It caused a lot of problems for the NBA, and big names like LeBron James, who’s been known as a voice for social justice, did not say a word. If anything, he probably said the opposite, especially in private, to Daryl Morey from what we can tell. He was very, very quiet about it, and most of the other NBA players were very quiet about it.
Even when they stand up for issues within the United States, they didn’t want to stand up against China. But when we think about it that way, we’re thinking about it in terms of the US companies being producers selling stuff into China. The reality is China sells a lot more products into the United States and into Western democracies.
We’re far more often the consumers than we are the producers trying to sell to the Chinese consumer. How do Chinese companies react to Western values? Are they more likely to stand up for illiberal sentiments when they’re pushed on those? Or are they more likely to try to bend to be able to pick up greater market share and to try to change their own practices the way that American companies will when they’re trying to get into the Chinese market?
Alexander Dukalskis: So I’ll say two things about this. Well, three things actually. One is that I think publics in liberal democracies in general are more tolerant of criticism than publics in China. And so I think American publics are pretty inured to companies and governments and publics elsewhere saying bad stuff about them.
It doesn’t really matter if a company is saying bad stuff about the United States because it just comes out in the wash. And so there’s not that same level of hypersensitivity about criticisms or perceived slights in these markets anyway. And so the attitude of those sending the goods, I think, matters less to some degree.
The other thing I’ll say is that, in terms of whether Chinese institutions coming to quote-unquote the West have to moderate their illiberal tendencies — a case study I think you can take is the Confucius Institute project from China, to have Chinese language and culture institutes in universities abroad.
And I would say there wasn’t so much an effort to become more liberal as there was to hide or obfuscate the illiberalism through political institutions and titles and arrangements that few Westerners even really understand. And so you could plausibly say that a Confucius Institute is somehow independent because the director is local and because the ultimate central authority that organizes these is non-governmental.
But it fails to realize that there’s no meaningful non-governmental entity of any importance in China, and that in most cases there was a number-two director that actually was more important. And so there was an effort, I think, to change the perception of the institution without necessarily becoming more liberal.
The third thing I would say is that often when Chinese influence comes up in discourse in the West, and in particular I think the United States, it’s often framed around national security. So the Huawei 5G rollout globally — it wasn’t so much about liberal values as such, and more about espionage and access to information.
And so they’re often framed in that way, I think, rather than a liberal versus illiberal dichotomy.
jmk: So one of the things that I struggle with is I don’t get a sense that there’s a vision of what an illiberal order would actually look like, particularly in terms of redesigning institutions to reflect that.
I get much more the sense that countries like China and Russia value many of the liberal institutions and liberal systems, but want to be able to warp and shape them and leverage them to have greater influence and impose their values onto those systems. Is there actually an idea of what an illiberal order would actually look like?
What is it that they would replace the liberal world order and liberal institutions with?
Alexander Cooley: Yeah. So I think it’s a really reasonable question to ask, especially now that we’re widely acknowledging that we’re in an order transition and we see the old order being dismantled, but what are we actually going to and what do countries like China and Russia want?
I think if we go down the road of thinking about an a priori kind of infrastructure of order with its institutions, its norms, its governing principles and routines, we’re going to get ourselves into trouble because there is not a universal global vision that these countries share or even want. China doesn’t want to deal with security management in the Middle East.
Especially not now. So I think there’s a negative order, and that is to be free of the constraints of sanctions, of stigmatization, of opprobrium, and of scrutiny on their kinds of practices, hence the doubling down on the messaging of sovereignty. Beyond that, different countries and different rulers are going to want different things.
Many of these leaders actually don’t want the scrutiny and want the engagement with China because they want to be able to skim off a Chinese road or highway contract. Others want to posture that they are strong and in control by saying that they’re not exclusively aligned with the West or with the US,
that they’re in partnership and open to all of these countries that respect country X and country Y. So these are all techniques of rule. I would say, though, if you want to look at some universal areas where they could agree, I would say they could agree about the extraterritorial application of a lot of their domestic law, especially when it comes to political opposition, conducting transnational repression, surveillance technology, cracking down on independent media in exile.
These are principles on which Moscow and Riyadh and Beijing absolutely agree. It’s just they’re not going to formally declare this, although there are some aspects of, say, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that create common watch lists of both individual dissidents and perceived organizations that are security threats.
So again, if we look at this through the lens of domestic regime survival, that takes us to the issues and the areas where I think they would be more intent on informal and formal order. But the pragmatism for some is the point. The lack of constraint and formal procedures is beneficial to a lot of them.
And then finally, you have the category within these countries of autocrats, and this gets back to the relationship between autocracy and kleptocracy, who might be adjacent to rule or they might be looking at their rule waning and just want to have exit options — for themselves and their family and their assets.
And that creates a whole different kind of engagement with the liberal infrastructure, to keep their property safe and secure multiple residencies and citizenships and so forth, to be able to flee. So it’s a complicated question, but I think we need to look at it in terms of regime security as opposed to starting top-down in terms of order construction.
jmk: So your book is primarily about the study of authoritarian influence within the international arena, the idea that authoritarians are having greater influence and the impact that that’s having on liberal values and the liberal international order globally. What has the study of that really taught each of you about the meaning and purpose of democracy?
Not just the impact on democracy, but what exactly democracy means and why it is that we’re fighting for it.
Alexander Dukalskis: For me, our book came out in 2025. It went to press in November 2024, when the US presidential election resulted in Trump’s second term. And I think in that second term, there have been a lot of actions in the international sphere that have been profoundly illiberal, and that whatever the intention — and sometimes it’s hard to divine intentions — have pulled in the same direction as a lot of the world’s autocrats.
So dismantling organizations like Freedom House or cutting funding to organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy — the list goes on and on and on. So for me, the biggest reflection I’ve had is not so much what this means for democracy as such, but what is the United States, and what is the United States doing in the international sphere?
That’s been the biggest point of reflection as we’ve talked with colleagues about the book.
Alexander Cooley: So I would echo Alex D. I would add another one, and to me, my biggest realization — and I’m speaking from the point of view of a scholar of governance and democracy — is that many of the public goods and resources and things that we thought were going to be perpetually available, that allow more and more of a fine-grained analysis of democratic processes across a wide range of issues, that they’ve either disappeared or they’re in severe jeopardy.
And I think this to me is the most unanticipated thing. There is a common preference amongst illiberal actors in the world to not have investigative reporting, to not have indices and country rankings, to not have publicly available data on degrees of media freedom. And this is something that I think the academy is going to struggle with, but ultimately, it’s up to the academy to try and get the philanthropies involved in this, because we’ve already lost a lot of knowledge about democracy and governance globally.
And the assumption that it was always going to be there and actors of good faith would take care of it — that itself is seeming more and more like a historicized type of assumption. So we need to resurrect this ecosystem of studying democracy globally, or at least make the case for how we have to fund it and fight for its maintenance.
jmk: Alex D, let me ask you one more question because you brought up the United States and its influence in terms of illiberalism throughout the world. The United States is still widely considered a liberal democracy, but it is acting in an increasingly illiberal direction. Do you believe that a country can remain both liberal and democratic domestically while acting illiberally abroad?
Alexander Dukalskis: Well, I’ll say something about the measurement issue first, which is that there’s quite a lot of dispute, I would say, about in 2025 what the United States is. So previously we talked about this kind of GDP, most democratic, most authoritarian. The numbers for 2025, the index we relied on was the Varieties of Democracy liberal democracy index, and we pegged the most democratic states as the top twenty-five percent most liberal democratic.
Well, in 2025, actually V-Dem has the US outside of the top twenty-five percent of that list. So if we update our numbers for 2025, the global GDP of the most liberal democratic states and the most authoritarian states are about equal. It’s like a fair fight, and the US is somewhere in the middle, more towards the liberal democratic side.
Now, how much mileage do you get out of these different rankings and stuff? That’ll vary based on your methods and what you want to look at, but it’s not out of the question that the US is not near the top of those lists anymore. In terms of a liberal democratic state acting illiberally abroad, I think the US for a lot of its recent history has done that.
It’s enacted many illiberal policies abroad. Sometimes that’s for partisan reasons, sometimes it’s for military misadventures abroad.
But what the US always had up until really recently is this commitment to sustain an ecosystem of liberalism, to be, for the most part, at the table in UN human rights conversations, even if certain administrations were a little bit more reticent or more wary to be committed to promoting democracy promotion programs abroad in a bipartisan way.
Both parties shared this commitment. They would differ on tactics or priority cases or the like, but they shared this commitment, and now that’s not the case anymore. And I think there are a variety of ways in which the US remains a democracy, but its commitment to democracy is in question internationally.
jmk: Well, Alex Cooley, Alex Dukalskis, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to plug the book one more time. It’s called Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics. Thank you so much for discussing it with us today. Thank you so much for writing the book.
Alexander Cooley: Thanks for having me.
Alexander Dukalskis:Thank you, Justin.
Links
Learn more about Alexander Cooley.
Learn more about Alexander Dukalskis.
Learn more about their book Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics (Oxford University Press, 2026)
Learn more about the Kellogg Institute
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Email comments or questions to jkempf@democracyparadox.com
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