This week we ask: Can struggling democracies learn anything useful from well performing dictatorships?
This week we welcome a special guest who has direct experience at the sharp end of politics. Charles Dunst is a former foreign correspondent who has reported from many countries around the world, who is now deputy director of research & analytics at The Asia Group – a business advisory firm based in Washington, D.C. – and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent and bipartisan DC-based think tank.
Charles has just published a new book, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman, in which he argues that democracies that are struggling with low public trust and poor performance might have a thing or two to learn about effective governance from the world’s more successful autocracies – most notably Singapore, but also others.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
democracies, singapore, government, book, governance, uae, accountability, system, trust, working, politicians, notion, long term, autocracy, ucl, issues, meritocratic, lse, china, united kingdom
SPEAKERS
Alan Renwick, Charles Dunst
Alan Renwick 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we ask: can struggling democracies learn anything useful from well performing dictatorships?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
This week we have another of our occasional special guest episodes with someone from outside UCL who has direct experience at the sharp end of politics. That person is Charles Dunst, a former foreign correspondent who has reported from many countries around the world, who is now deputy director of research & analytics at The Asia Group – which is a business advisory firm based in Washington, D.C. – and he's also an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and independent and bipartisan D.C.-based think tank.
Charles has just published a new book, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman, in which he argues that democracies that are struggling with low public trust and poor performance might have a thing or two to learn about effective governance from the world's more successful autocracies – most notably Singapore, but also others.
So Charles, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics. I'm really looking forward to exploring this book.
And before we get into the book, I guess it would be interesting for me and for our listeners to find out a little bit more about you. So what is your background? What has led you to want to write this book?
Charles Dunst 01:47
Sure, and thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
I mean, my background is maybe a little odd for a policy person, kind of author type. I mean, I was a journalist. I mean, that was really my background, straight out of undergraduate. Straight out of my undergraduate university, I was a journalist based in Southeast Asia, writing mostly on Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar for the New York Times and the Atlantic. And I was there for a little bit over a year-ish, and basically was in this moment of figuring out: well, do I want to be a journalist or do I want to work on foreign policy issues?
And it became kind of apparent to me that at an early stage in my career I couldn't do both – that I couldn't say, 'well, I want to be a foreign correspondent for some American or British newspaper' because those jobs often tend to be internal promotions, where, if you're the Los Angeles Times' Southeast Asia correspondent, you pay your dues for five to 10 years working in Los Angeles or working in Washington, covering local or domestic politics. And I realised, well, I care much more about these international issues than I necessarily do about journalism or being a journalistic practitioner, which basically is how I ended up in London, where I worked at LSE Ideas – the London School of Economics' foreign policy think tank – and did my masters at the LSE simultaneously while still doing some journalism on the side. And this was 2019-2020.
Basically, and I tell everyone – I advise all my kind of American folks who come for mentorship, career advice – I say 'go to the UK to do a masters, it's much cheaper and usually half the time'. And I had a really positive experience in London, obviously.
And basically this book came about because of my connection with LSE Ideas, where a book agent had reached out to LSE Ideas wanting to do a book with some of their senior leadership. I think it was something maybe on British foreign policy. I can't exactly remember. But that didn't pan out.
And what ended up happening was they passed the agent off to me and said 'Well, go talk to Charles. Charles is a journalist. He's written a bunch of stuff on Southeast Asia. And maybe there's a book there. Maybe there's some idea there.' And this was March 14 2020. So I think we got coffee once before the world shut down. I was in London for a bit, but I was back in New York.
But anyway, this agent and I went back and forth, back and forth. I put together a proposal on the Vietnam War, looking at the Vietnam War, and my argument [was that it] broke US foreign policy and we continue repeating the same errors. And all these publishers said: 'No, we don't really want this at the moment. It's not really a particularly sexy topic. It's a little historical. And I, you know, it's historical, it's not so interesting.'
And instead what happened was Hodder & Stoughton approached my agent, Jack. And Jack had in a previous life been editor at Penguin. So he understood both sides of this equation of being an editor but also being an agent. And essentially, Hodder & Stoughton approach to him and said: 'well, we want to do a book on autocracy, or on the democracy-autocracy thing, but with no...' They didn't really have much of an idea of what that was going to be. And we went back and... But they said to Jack: 'do you know someone who could do it fast and for not a lot of money?' And Jack goes: 'yep, I got just the guy'.
So we went back and forth trying to shape it and kind of pull it together into what it became. And I think it became what it is because of my experiences travelling and working in autocracies like Vietnam or in autocracies like Singapore, the UAE, that in the grand scheme of things are somewhat – not somewhat – are definitely unusual autocracies, particularly Singapore. And thinking about, well, there's all this democratic dysfunction, what is the challenge today? What is the challenge of the Singapores, of the Vietnams, of the UAEs.
But I really think the overall mechanism – or the overall argument of this book or the goal – was to give solutions. Because a lot of the democracy books are saying: this is the problem – we can't govern, we can't deliver, more and more people want autocracy. But they don't have solutions. Or maybe if eight chapters are problems, [there is] one chapter of solutions. And I wanted to kind of flip that structure on its head and actually say: well, I'm going to lay out the problem very clearly in the first chapter, or for the introduction, and then everything else will be solutions. And certainly people won't agree with all of them. But I wanted to at least give an aspirational roadmap from which policymakers, writers, journalists, so on could maybe pick and choose a few hopefully good ideas.
Alan Renwick 05:19
So we shall get on to those solutions in just a moment.
But we should I guess start off a little bit by talking about the problem. And how would you characterise the problem of democracy? And would it be right to say that you see it largely as a challenge of poor governance – that democracies are failing to govern effectively and that leads on to low levels of public trust, high levels of kind of disillusionment? So but the essence that you see is poor governance, essentially.
Charles Dunst 06:23
Honestly, yes. I mean, that is my read. My read is that essentially there is poor governance. And I think many of this can be traced back to the end of the Cold War, where there was this notion of well, of course, I mean, the 'end of history' thesis and all of that. This notion that: well, our great autocratic competitor has gone, and our great ideological competitor is gone, so if democracy is all that exists – or democracy is the ultimate system – we shouldn't have to fight so much to make it work. I think there was this sense that democracy would just work intrinsically, rather than thinking: well, we actually need to stay focused on improvements; you need to stay vigilant about declining democracy or this notion of inequality – economic inequality – really undermining people's faith in the government.
So I do think it's poor governance. I mean, if you can think about, well, why was the rise of Trump possible in the United States? And the answer is clearly... I mean, I think... So there are certainly ethnic nationalist concerns that played a role. But I'm a believer that many – most – of the Trump voters are not voting for him on immigration, I don't think. I think many people are voting for him on issues related to economics. Either of his solutions are obviously not realistic in terms of well, we'll bring mining back to West Virginia – it's not realistic.
But I think there is this frustration with globalisation and capitalism that people seem to think go hand in hand with democracy, if that makes sense. I think there's this notion of, since the 1990s, democracy and globalisation went hand in hand. And people felt that well, this isn't working for me, because even if the world got richer – even if the United States and China got richer by trading with one another – while I am sitting in West Virginia lost my job, or I in Ohio feel that my community has been disrupted by the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the kind of inability of the government to step in and fix many of these issues.
And I really do think it is a poor governance problem. And that is part of the reason why... I mean trust in government levels are quite low in countries as varied as South Korea, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom. And we all have very different challenges. I mean, if you want to make the case in the United States, United Kingdom it's about immigration or it's about ethnic issues, I guess you can make the argument. But that's a harder sell in Japan and South Korea, which are homogenous societies. I mean, like the frustration in South Korea or the frustration in Japan is certainly – that frustration looks very different than American or British frustration. But it is rooted in the same notion of well, the government's not working: the government's sclerotic, the economic outlook for me and my children is worse.
And I think that actually is the crux of it really: the polls show that people are far less optimistic with their children's economic features than they were 20, 30 years ago. And that's a massive problem, particularly for a country like the United States that is the richest country in the history of the world. There's no justification for that. And I think it's not hard for me to understand why you feel so pessimistic about the future, why you might consider new ideas and a new system. And then this new idea and new system being some type of illiberal Viktor Orbán type leader who might not believe in democracy, but does believe in some type of national development or something like that.
Alan Renwick 09:31
And how do you come to the thought that, in seeking a solution to these ills of democracy, autocracies might be a good place to look? Because I mean on the whole democracies are richer, [have] higher wellbeing, greater freedom, better governance, we would often think. So why is it useful to look at autocracies for potential solutions?
Charles Dunst 09:31
Well, I agree with you for sure that democracies are richer and better governed. Absolutely. I think they're...
It's interesting to look at some of these autocratic exceptions, though. And the autocratic exception to me really is Singapore. Because you can talk about the Gulf states. And I think the Gulf states, you know, they get some credit – and they should get some credit – for actually effectively managing their natural resources, obviously, in a way that many countries in Africa, Latin America have struggled to do. It is no small thing to avoid the resource curse.
But Singapore is the exception because Singapore's natural resource are its people, or natural resources is its people. Singapore has no natural resources: it has no oil, it has nothing like that that can make the country rich and make the country successful. And the reason Singapore is what it is today is because of really smart policymaking by Lee Kuan Yew, this notion of: well, let's build infrastructure to attract manufacturers or to attract outside capital; let's maintain macroeconomic stability; let's really spend a lot of money on health care, a lot of money on human capital development, on education, and all these things that turned Singapore into a really effective country despite not being a democracy at all. And the reason I spent so much time in Singapore is precisely that, is that because it is the exception.
And so the broad answer to your question is: certainly there are some small efforts like meritocratic civil service that Singapore does that democracies can learn from. But it is my argument that democracies can implement these goals or implement these ideals much better than any autocracy could because our systems are designed to counter corruption, our systems are designed to be accountable, we are designed to have effective feedback loops, even if we're not delivering right now. I think the line I used in the book is: our problems are political, and autocracies' problems are existential. And I think that is true with, again, the possible exception of Singapore. But if you're thinking about how would China reform its governance to reduce graft, I mean, it's almost impossible to think you could fully remove corruption from the Chinese system or the Vietnamese system, and even to some extent the Emirati system.
And I think it is ironic to me that you hear many autocrats around the world say: 'well, I want to be like Lee Kuan Yew, I want to build my country into a Singapore'. But clearly the problem there is Lee Kuan Yew designed the Singaporean system from scratch and built a system that is explicitly designed to kind of not have corruption and graft within it, to be fairly meritocratic. Whereas, of course, if you are sitting in Beijing or you're sitting in Moscow and you're saying: 'well, how can I adopt all those Singaporean policies?', they are incompatible with your system because that system is rooted in graft, it's rooted in corruption, it's rooted in political patronage and all that.
Certainly, I think 95-98% of autocracies offer no lessons for democracies. But there are some things that Singapore has done well, there are some things that the UAE has done well, there are some things that, at least the infrastructure spending, is something that China has focused on – that that focus is positive. But the argument being, of course, don't implement these things and lose your liberal character as a democracy. It's no, of course. It's implement, make your system more meritocratic, maybe you can learn from Singapore a little bit, but maintain your liberal character and do these things better than autocracies ever could.
Alan Renwick 13:14
And are you saying that there are things that Singapore has been able to do well because it's not a democracy? Or are you just saying that maybe we're a bit too kind of blinkered in where we look for inspiration and how to do better, and we fail to look at sometimes useful lessons that can be learnt from dictatorships, from autocracies, as well as from democratic states?
Charles Dunst 13:39
I mean thinking about Singapore specifically, having a meritocratic civil service I think is not something that only autocracy can do. Certainly, I mean, South Korea's civil service or government staffing is a much more meritocratic matter than the United States. There's nothing inimical to me about doing that in a democracy. Honestly, some of the examples of things that autocracies have done, that democracies have struggled to do, is more so like China, thinking about the vast amount of money that gets thrown at infrastructure projects. Whereas of course, the United States, the United Kingdom has to be approved by different parts of the government. We've been thinking in the United States, of course, you can't just roll out a huge infrastructure spending that's not going to get congressional buy-in.
And the irony is that actually, of course, serves democracies better I think in the long term. Even if we may appear sclerotic at times, or appear slow, having those congressional checks or those parliamentary checks or whatever you want to call it does prevent us I think, at times, from spending money or wasting money, from basically saying: 'well, some leader in power wants to divert a huge amount of money to a very specific road to nowhere, so bridge to nowhere'. Usually, democracies can check against that, or at least in their ideal functioning democracies can check against that.
So I think many of the things that I think we could do better – I mean meritocracy, building trust in government – these are not things that autocracies have done because they are autocracies. Like there are things that some of these few autocracies have done because they've either been blessed with reasonably focused leaders, thinking about a Lee Kuan Yew or some folks within the Vietnamese or the UAE or the Emirati system, not because they're autocracies.
Alan Renwick 15:17
Yes. Well, let's get into some of the particular areas of potentially better governance that you explore in the book. And actually you've been talking there already quite a bit about the possibilities for long-term thinking and the importance of long-term thinking and investment in infrastructure, investments in human capital, and all that kind of thing. And I guess there is a familiar sort of argument that says that democracies are uniquely bad at long-term thinking because they're sort of locked into the electoral cycle that focuses the minds of politicians on short term thinking. Whereas autocracies – stable autocracies – can perhaps think a bit further to the long term.
So what do you see there as the lessons that democracies can learn? And I guess also, how concretely how do democracies do better? You know, are there specific things that we learn there other than just it's important to think about the long term?
Charles Dunst 16:17
Sure. I mean, I think some of the things that autocracies do well here – or at least the small select group of autocracies is – I like the idea that China has these Five Year Plans, even if these Five Year Plans can often be met with derision because they're not realistic, because, of course, in an autocracy, there are not effective feedback mechanisms, and you're trying to put things on paper to satisfy the leader at the top rather than being honest. The idea of actually having goals in the next five years, I think, is very positive.
And many Western countries have similar plans, but they're usually defence: they're defence focused or national security focused. But wouldn't it be quite nice if the United Kingdom had a five- or 10-year health care plan? What's the NHS gonna look like in five to 10 years? Or you're sitting in the United States.
And I think we're seeing that a little bit more now, of: well, what's our 10-year semiconductor plan or our 10-year electric vehicle plan or green energy plan – all these things that are really vital to the functioning of democracies moving forward, but maybe are not as headline grabbing as defence or maybe not, for whatever reason, institutionalised as much.
So I do like the idea of actually perhaps having some requirement that every administration in the United States or every government that comes into power in the United Kingdom or South Korea or whatever is forced within two years or within a year to put on paper some five year plans or 10 year plans, or whatever your you want to put it, for what will the state of healthcare be, what will the state of our infrastructure be? And you're seeing it now, I think, a tiny bit on issues like rare earths, on issues like electric vehicles, precisely because of the China challenge. And the notion that well, we need to reduce our reliance on China for these things, has prompted some long-term thinking.
And arguably, I do think the one key way to do it would be to actually require these administrations to lay them out. And I think what's clear, though, is democracies can think in the long term. I mean, the Marshall Plan is the most obvious example. The Marshall Plan was highly unpopular in the United States. The progressives thought – the left thought – it was too much spending. The right thought it was essentially warmongering, that the other powers in Europe and Asia would be mad about it. And, no, the government persisted and said: 'No, this is a long-term investment. Even if it's a little unpopular, no, this is a long-term investment in peace and security in Europe.'
It's my hope, though, that that might prompts some long-term thinking on more directly domestic focused issues because, as much as citizens are normal people are engaged in the notion of US-China competition or China's relationship with Europe, people are not necessarily thinking about rare earth on a day to day basis. Whereas they are thinking on a day-to-day basis is the NHS working, what are the gas or fuel prices at the moment? And having long term plans on those issues, I think, it'd be really critical.
And clearly it worked. And I think there's nothing inimical about long-term thinking to democracy. It's more so just about who are our politicians, what are they focused on, and how are their voters pushing them?
And clearly, I would argue that our focus on the long term has declined. A part of that is social media. Part of that is just the way our news cycles operate. And so as a result, thinking about that, looking at that system, perhaps an actual required checks or required institutional mechanisms to require folks to actually put on paper some of these plans, I think, would be a very strong first step.
Alan Renwick 19:37
Of course, that means that you need to get politicians to introduce the requirements in the first case, the first place. So in some way, you need to kind of change the fundamental incentive structures, I guess, that politicians are facing. I mean, are there kind of democratic reforms or changes to how we approach politics that would be necessary in order to get there? Or do you think a bit of exhortation from people like you, and good books like this one, might get us there?
Charles Dunst 20:09
I'm optimistic that it's the latter and not the former. I mean, I think in my book I didn't... I mean, again, this is also because this was not a book just for UK audiences or just for US audiences. And it's already 350 pages. So I didn't lay out any specific: well, here's the US electoral reform or here's the UK electoral reform. I more so thought about, honestly, the latter – of thinking about well, how can we basically rely on our politicians or push our politicians to actually think on these issues? And frankly, if they aren't, will the new generation of people step up and actually run for these offices?
And you're already beginning to see that, I think, in the United States and, to some extent, the United Kingdom. But there is a younger generation of policymakers. And by younger, I'm not talking 20s, 30s. I mean, I really think some folks even in their 40s – compared to obviously much older, much older leaders, much older senators and congresspeople in the United States – are much more focused on these things. And you're thinking about who is driving some of the chips investment, who's driving some of the electrical vehicle subsidies. It's mostly some of the younger folks. Or who's driving investment in cybersecurity, who's driving regulation of AI. All of these things that are not issues at the moment are being driven by younger politicians in their 40s, 30s, maybe 50s. And that, to me, is clearly a step in the right direction, certainly not enough. But maybe I'm an optimist for believing that kind of expectation will get us there, perhaps sooner rather than later.
Alan Renwick 21:34
Okay, let's look at some of the other areas in the book.
So we've talked about long term thinking and so on. I was fascinated that you talk also in the book about lessons that democracies might learn in relation to accountability and public trust. Because these are the kinds of things that conventionally we imagine democracies are particularly good at – they're good at holding those in power to account. Whereas we imagine that there's a lack of accountability mechanisms in autocracies. And similarly, we would tend to imagine that public trust – there are at least mechanisms for ensuring that if the public don't trust those in power, they can remove them and hopefully get in power people whom they trust more. But you suggested that, actually, in some ways it can be the other way around – that in some ways accountability and trust can be better in the well-functioning autocratic systems.
Charles Dunst 22:30
I think it's really interesting and, arguably, the thing that surprised me the most in the book. It's thinking that the Vietnams of the world – really Vietnam, Singapore, to some extent, the UAE – have extraordinarily high levels of public trust from the government.
And I think it made clear to me that this is very much about performance legitimacy. That it is not necessarily about, well, is this the democratic government that I can maybe vote out? This is about, well, is my life better than it was 20, 15 years ago? And for many... I mean, certainly if you're in Vietnam, the answer is yes. If you're in the UAE, the answer is yes. If you're in Singapore, the answer is probably yes. And this is not to say that, of course, I mean, democracies are superior – when they function appropriately, democracies do hold people more accountable, and there should be more trust in government because you can vote people out. Theoretically, everyone has will has equality under the law.
And what I found most interesting about the Singapore, kind of UAE examples – and these are the highly functioning autocracies that are, of course, exceptions – there are public shows of accountability. And but even in a country like Vietnam, where Vietnam, by all metrics, is more corrupt than most of these advanced democracies, it is less accountable. But because that's the reality, and because so many citizens are corruption weary, that they're frustrated that they have to pay the bribe to the policeman on the street or something, the government makes a big show of cracking down on corruption to say: 'well, we do care, we care about this issue, and we're pushing against it'. And it does win the government a fair bit of support because people actually realise the government is trying.
Singapore, I mean, Singapore is actually pretty un-corrupt by all by all metrics. It is fairly accountable. The UAE is kind of somewhere in between where generally actually not particularly corrupt, at least the level below the maybe the ruling family.
So I think it surprised me that there was this much accountability and there was this much public trust in autocracies. But what it shows to me is that democracies are maybe just not living up to our values, honestly, as much as we should be. And some of the book was overtaken by events in the sense of I think I wrote it when I said: 'well, no one has brought charges against former President Trump'. But I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to sit here and tell you is he guilty, is he innocent. That's above my paygrade. But clearly, no one should be above the law, and that he should have his day in court if there is evidence to justify it. And I think that the fact that we've seen that is a positive demonstration of accountability because polls actually show the majority of Americans do think he should have a day in court. Even if there's the 25-30% of his base support that think he can do no wrong, the majority of Americans actually like the idea of everyone having equality under the law and everyone having their day in court.
So it is unusual to think that autocracies could be outperforming us on this and, of course, 98% of them are not. But the few that are pose a real challenge because I think people sitting in democracies sometimes feel as if our systems are running amok, whereas they feel like Singapore is very clean, or the UAE is very clean, and they move to counter corruption, and they hold their officials accountable, they fire them from government. Whereas people can kind of continuously get things wrong, or continuously be corrupt, in the US and the UK etc, and just kind of get away with it.
So to some extent, when it comes to the citizenry, perception is reality. Where even if the data shows that, you know, the United States is less corrupt than Singapore, which actually the data does not show. But if the data was to say that, you know, that Singapore is less corrupt than the United Kingdom, I think if you asked many Brits who've been to both countries and have lived in both countries, their immediate reaction would be: of course, Singapore is less corrupt, because they crack down so harshly on corruption and all that. So I think it is for democracies at the moment about perception, about countering the perception in our own societies that we are not holding power for people accountable, because it does weaken trust in government. I think the very obviously, and trust clearly, is the bedrock of democracy.
Alan Renwick 26:31
I think there's sometimes a tendency in democracy, certainly in the UK, to think that because there's electoral accountability, you don't need other forms of accountability as well. And indeed, you sometimes hear politicians responding to suggestions that politicians such as Boris Johnson, for example, should be held to account through regulatory mechanisms. They respond by saying: 'well, ultimately, he is accountable to the voters, and that is the form of accountability that we need'. But actually, that isn't sufficient accountability. Just having a vote every few years isn't enough to – voters have so many other issues they might be wanting to vote on when it comes to an election time. So you do need additional mechanisms of accountability. And perhaps in democracies, we just kind of forget that sometimes.
Charles Dunst 27:19
No, I think that's absolutely right. I think the accountability, the ballot box is important and should not be forgotten about. And, you know, I'm curious what the UK elections look like in 16 months for that reason.
But it's clearly not enough. I mean, the notion that I think it's one of the senators from Alabama has basically violated one of the regulations for how sitting US Congresspeople or US Senators can trade stocks. He's violated it over 100 times and has paid a small fine, and that's kind of the end of it. And that's clearly not reasonable to me because if you're a normal person – you know, I'm a normal person, I work at a business advisory firm – if I was to turn around and, you know, buy the stock of one of our clients based on inside information, I wouldn't just get away with it with a small fine because I'm a normal person, not a senator. And the fact that you can draw that line between the kind of the normal people and those with power is really damaging to a system that is based on equality under the law.
So yes, the electoral accountability helps – and it can help to ensure good governance, or it can at least instil some fear in politicians that they can't just do whatever they want, because they have voters that hold them to account – but that can't be the only thing. It can't be once you're in power, you're only accountable to voters. You are also still accountable under the law.
Alan Renwick 28:36
I suppose a sceptical listener might be thinking that: okay, so trust in government is higher in some autocracies, but isn't that just because the government controls the media and the information that's available, and therefore people aren't seeing the bad things that were happening? And therefore, actually, you know, we should be very wary about learning any lessons, though?
Charles Dunst 28:59
I think that is true to an extent.
Let's put it this way. Vietnam in 2021 posted in a 93% trust in government. I'm willing to say maybe 25-30% of that is people saying that, well, they know what the right thing to say is to satisfy the government; they know that it's just easier to say, 'yeah, of course, I trust the government' rather than fight against it. But even if you subtract 30-40%, you're still at support in the 50s, low 60s, which is higher than almost every democracy at this point, where US trust in government's around 28%, I believe Japan and South Korea are in the mid-30s. It kind of varies across Europe, but Italy it was around 40, the UK is around 38-39, and that has surely gone down over the last year.
So even if we're factoring in the kind of self-censorship or the way the media ecosystem is limited and shapes people's opinions, even if we're factoring that in for I don't know 40% of their support, that support is still higher than in democracies. And I think sometimes it's a little bit easy for us to just write off the trust and government of these autocracy by saying: 'oh, you know, the media environment is just shaped by the ruling party'. And I think that would be unwise to just kind of say that and move on, because it would allow us to escape and fail to grapple with what I think is actually a fairly troubling reality, and would allow us to kind of say, 'well, that's not real, let's just move on' rather than deal with what is hard at the moment.
Alan Renwick 30:27
Well, we're coming towards the end of our time. But just before we finish, one final question. So we have policymakers from the UK listening to this this podcast. If there's one core message that you want to get across to those policymakers, what would it be?
Charles Dunst 30:43
It's a little bit of a cop out. But rather than give a specific policy suggestion, I think what I've said when I've been asked this before, is just to be brave and to actually think about, as a politician, as a sitting policymaker, what decisions can you make that will actually improve the livelihoods of your people?
And I think the example I gave in the book was: there were more than a few of these congressmen, the US congressmen and congresswomen, in 2010 – Tom Perriello being one of them – who voted for Obamacare despite knowing that vote would lose them their seats. And I think that was incredibly brave. And clearly it was worth one seat – losing your seat to extend health care to millions of Americans, even if Obamacare was not perfect. But just setting that precedent was so clearly worth the cost. And I think there are far too far too few politicians that would be willing to make that trade off. So that would be my... My one bit of advice would be to stand up and be brave and vote for things that even maybe seem a little bit unpopular at the moment, but clearly will have a benefit for the people you're supposed to be serving.
Alan Renwick 31:46
A very fine note to end on.
Thank you so much, Charles – really interesting conversation and great book as well.
So we have been talking about Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman by Charles Dunst, published in February by Hodder & Stoughton. It's available in all good book shops, and it's a fascinating and very thought provoking read. So I really do recommend it.
Next week, we're looking at the implications of increasingly sophisticated military technology.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Alice Hart and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
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