Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

Sergei Guriev — Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, himself a political exile from Russia — and Daniel Treisman of UCLA have produced in this book the most important recent contribution to understanding how modern authoritarian regimes actually maintain power. Their argument, developed through extensive comparative data, is that the old model of authoritarian control — fear, violence, overt censorship — has been largely superseded among sophisticated authoritarian regimes by a new model based on information manipulation: manufacturing the appearance of popular support, controlling media narratives, delegitimising opposition, and engineering political reality rather than enforcing it through coercion.

Spin Dictators is essential reading for the information environment because it shows that disinformation is not merely a tool that authoritarian regimes deploy externally — it is the central mechanism through which they maintain domestic power. The techniques that Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, and their counterparts use to manage their domestic information environments are the same techniques they export through influence operations: manufactured consensus, delegitimised opposition, and the systematic blurring of the boundary between information and propaganda. For practitioners, the book provides the political science foundation for understanding why information control is so central to the authoritarian playbook.