Fear Factor

It is a well-established empirical finding that democracies have declined in number and in quality in recent years. It seems to follow that another political system is becoming more prevalent—but how the alternative differs from previous forms of autocratic politics remains an unsettled question. Although much attention has focused on so-called strongmen, such as former U.S. President Donald Trump and former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, they are hardly novel characters in world history. But what enabled their rise now, and can their brand of governance survive beyond them?

Three recent books considering 21st-century political systems arrive at very different answers to these questions. One demonstrates how today’s autocrats prefer manipulating their citizens to outright repression; it may be the most sophisticated and robust account of the new alternatives to democracy. Another identifies mistakes that liberal democracies keep making with regard to the new autocrats. And the last points to a supposed factor in the decline of democracy—increasingly diverse societies and the difficulties of dealing with them—without arguing that democracies are necessarily doomed.

 differ from previous dictatorships in that rulers ruthlessly concentrate power but do not officially abolish institutions such as parliaments. Nor do they actually disavow democracy, for that matter. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s substantiates this intuition with data. Guriev and Treisman, social scientists who specialize in Russia, distinguish between “fear dictatorships,” a more traditional model relying on terror to enforce ideological conformity, and “spin dictatorships,” a newer kind that refrains from widespread repression but ensures a change of power is