 Hi, good afternoon from Helsinki. Welcome to day three of our UNU wider development conference on COVID and development. My name is Rachel Gisselquist. I'm a senior research fellow here at UNU wider. And I'm very pleased to be here today to chair and introduce our keynote speaker, Professor Stefan Lindberg. He will be speaking on COVID-19 trends for democracy and autocracy. So around the world, it seems the pandemic has been linked with new restrictions on political freedoms and rights. And this comes at a time when observers of democracy have been warning for well over a decade of declines in global democracy. It's a topic that we've paid some attention to certainly at UNU wider. I would say linked in particular with our work on the state and on issues of state legitimacy and capacity. In his lecture, Professor Lindberg will present the latest findings from the VEDEM Institute on the trends for democracy and autocracy in the world and the effects that the pandemic has had for rights and freedoms. So the VEDEM Institute has done and is doing some of the most indeed, maybe the most exciting and rigorous work on conceptualizing and measuring democracy worldwide and historically. And it's also one of the largest ever social science data collection efforts. Professor Lindberg is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University-Wide Research Infrastructure VEDEM Institute at the University of Gothenburg, founding a principal investigator of varieties of democracy, founding director of the National Research Infrastructure DEM score, Wallenberg Academy Fellow, author of Democracy and Elections in Africa, co-author of varieties of democracy, as well as other books and over 60 articles on issues of democracy, elections, democratization, autocratization, accountability, clientelism, women's representation, voting behavior and so on. He's also a friend to wider and he's currently collaborating in our project on clientelism and development. So I'm very pleased to welcome him here this afternoon in Helsinki. The way this session will run is that Professor Lindberg will give his lecture and then we'll have about 15, 20 minutes for questions and answer discussion with the audience. So I would encourage those of you joining us today to please think of the questions you might like to ask and pose them, type them in on your screen. I think there's a Q&A box or a chat box. So get the questions to us. Please feel free to send in questions during the lecture. And then when we turn to the Q&A session, I will pose as many of the questions as we have time for. So without further ado, let me turn over to Professor Lindberg for his keynote address. Stefan, the floor is yours. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you for that two kind introduction. And thank you to you and you wider for inviting me to give this keynote here today. As Rachel mentioned, I will talk about three things really that are interconnected. First, the trends for democracy and autocracy in the world with a special focus on what's happened the last 10 years. And then secondly, based on our pandemic backsliding project, what has happened with democracy and threats to democracy as a result, a direct result of the pandemic in the world. And then thirdly, I will also go into, based on our case for democracy project, to say a little bit about why these developments besides sort of threatening democracy, which is valuable in and of itself, but why it also has other ramifications and consequences. So let's start. So based on, this is the Democracy Report 2021 from the Wiedem Institute. And I wanna highlight three findings that we presented this year. The share of the world population living in autocracies have basically skyrocketed. And now two thirds of the world population live in autocracies. Let's look at the evidence for this. So this is the kind of typical graph that you would see whether it's Wiedem index, Wiedem indices or other, where you take the average across countries, right? And with this kind of graph that some people have been using then it doesn't seem that the development in the world is that radical in terms of autocratization. But remember in this type of graph, the seashells with 90,000 inhabitants count as much as India with 1.3 something million, a billion inhabitants. Now, democracy is ruled by the people. So we think it matters how many people are actually affected. And if we look at this last sort of 10 years here, look at what happens when we weigh this by population. Then all these downward trends are much more pronounced and in all regions of the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa where the development has so far been least pronounced. Okay, it's in fact, if you look at the world average there in the middle, the black line and you draw a line back like this, then you can see that we are back on the level of democracy that the average global citizen enjoy is now back to even before 1990 and the end of the Cold War. That should put things into perspective. I would think. We can look at this in terms of regime types. So same underlying data in Vietnam by using the regimes of the world classification. And this long-word trend of close dictatorships that were decreasing in number for a long time has now started to go up again, right? And since 1972 and with the third wave of democratization there was an increase in what we know now called electoral autocracies. The ones that seek to emulate democracy holding multi-party elections on paper but are not good enough or media freedom is not good enough or freedom of association is not good enough or all of it is not good enough. So they can't be classified as democracy. So Belarus, the Russia, Turkey today and so on. And taking together these two types of dictatorships then account for a majority of countries in the world and a two thirds of the world population. So that's the first point I wanna highlight that this wave of what we've called the third wave of autocratization is really a global phenomena and it has really brought the world back to levels that we saw last at the end of the Cold War. Electoral autocracies are the most common regime type and together with close autocracies there are 87 states now. Okay, so secondly, this was like what regimes countries are. Let's look at the same thing but now in terms of which countries are changing for the better or for the worse, right? So, and again, here the picture is that autocratization is accelerating, right? The share of the world population living in autocratizing countries, countries undergoing negative change has also skyrocketed and it's now one third of the world population. Let's look at the evidence for this, right? So here with a blue sort of purple line you see then in each year the number of countries that are in an episode of democratization and the third wave with a crescendo here in the early and mid nineties the end of the Cold War and of Soviet Union and so on lots of democratization happening in Africa and Asia at most 72 countries. That's dwindled down to 16. And at the same time from around 2000 the number of countries that are in an episode of autocratization has increased now numbering 25 and those 25 countries hope to 34% of the world population. These 16 are very small and only account for 4% of the world population. So that's really looking at it from this perspective this started some 20 years ago and this is really worrying because in this publication that came out in democratization it's open access we looked at all episodes of autocratization in democracies since 1900 to the present and almost 80% of them ended up with democracy breaking down. So the statistical probability that the countries that are now in an episode of autocratization that they would survive as democracies is really safe. Which countries are we talking about here? Here's a world map and you can see these countries that are sort of purple shaded that are have over the past 10 years improved on democracy and the red ones declined including the United States on the Trump of course but also Brazil, India, Turkey, Hungary and so on Philippines and so on. The top 10 are these ones in terms of autocratization in the period 2010 to 20. And you can see by the markings here that most of them started as democracies either liberal or electoral democracies and are now one or the other form of dictatorship including Hungary from around 2018 and now also India that by our latest measure as end of December 2020 can no longer be classified as an electoral democracy but is an electoral autocracy has a lot to do with media freedom and suppression of civil society and I'll show that in a second. But what's really struck us when we started to look at how autocratization unfolds in these countries and the others is how similar the processes are, right? So here the top 10 again, there are a couple of exceptions with Thailand and the coup and it will look the same for Myanmar I guess with next year's measure but overall the pattern is very similar and it's actually very similar to what Putin started to do in the early 2000s in Russia. First, if you look at which indicators change the first in this process of autocratization, well, what do you do? Well, first, you start to engage in suppression of the media and freedom of expression, censorship effort and freedom of academic and culture expression and repressed civil society, right? And only when you come far enough on those then you start to attack things like the free and fairness of elections and with Turkey all these indicators start to change much earlier then you attack the formal institutions of democracy. So it's almost like there's an autocratic playbook or dictator's playbook out there and they know what to do. Okay, and India here with a black line in the middle compared to some of its neighbors it's been quite a radical decline on the liberal democracy index and you can see it's now quite substantially below countries like Nepal and even Sri Lanka although it's going south in Sri Lanka as well and Nepal to some extent even if it's still above obviously Bangladesh and Pakistan. Well, you look at, okay, so what's changed over these 10 years here? What are the aspects of the liberal democracy index? It has 48 indicators, okay? We look at the top 20 here, right? And the ones that have changed the most and remember most of these indicators at that level they are measured on a zero to four measurement level. So a minus two or even a minus one is really a substantial change. Top of the line, government censorship of the media, second civil society repression and then you have EMB autonomy which happened with the last elections in India before that it was nothing but then the autonomy of the EMB was really compromised again then civil society, entry and exits and so on. So a lot of media indicators. So secondly point here, there's a third wave of autocratization is accelerating. It's engulfing a third of the world's population, 2.6 billion people whereas the country's democratizing are really small and have a very small share of the global population. And when countries are democratized they typically follow a very similar pattern and that includes India with its 1.37 billion citizens. Okay, thirdly then, this threat to freedom of expression is not only affecting the countries that are in a real sort of what we can establish as an episode of autocratization. We saw that it typically starts in that end and those are among the indicators that change first. So by intuition we should also see freedom of expression being threatened in countries that are not yet classified as autocratizing. That's exactly what we see. So here, if we look at in this graph different components of different varieties of democracy, right? And if you're above this diagonal line then things have gotten better in more countries then it's gotten worse. If you're below the line it's gotten worse in more countries then it's gotten better. Worse of all freedom of expression. In the last 10 years in 32 countries at least are statistically significant changes, right? Only. If we dive into the indicators that make up these components then it looks like this. Similar to the India graph, right? But now with a number of countries where this indicator has declined statistically significantly. Above the blue line you have the top 10. Eight of the top 10 have to do with freedom of expression. And then you have election, free and fairness of elections and top on a very top civil society repression with 50 countries where this has declined substantially and statistically significant in the last 10 years. So that's the third point that I wanted to bring up here from this about the trends for the autocracy, democracy and autocracy in the world. That the threat to freedom of expression and media intensifies. These 32 countries where their component has declined substantially and it was only 19, just three years ago. So it's accelerating. Repression of civil society goes hand in hand with this and it's also intensifying. And there are these 50 countries where we've registered substantial, statistically significant deterioration. But that's sort of the three big things I wanted to highlight that we discussed in the annual report that I think really speaks to what's going on in the world during this wave of autocratization. And then of course, the pandemic happened, right? So with financial support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sweden, we really wanted to, we were really worried about the effects of COVID-19 on democracy in the world because democracy is also foreign policy priority for Sweden. They call it the drive for democracy. So we took up the challenge to measure factually what governments are doing around the world. So this data now has covers five quarters since the second quarter of last year until the end of the second quarter this year. And I'm gonna just give you some summary findings from this large data collection process. So it's based on the international norms from the Office of Commission of Human Rights that emergency responses are acceptable in democracies as long as they're proportionate, they're necessary and non-discriminatory. And then based on that, the team pulled out seven indicators, discrimination, derogation of non-derogable rights, abuse of enforcement of restrictions, and then more authoritarian practices when you have no time limit on emergency measures, where you put limitations on the legislature or you engage in disinformation campaigns. And then in between here, sort of restrictions on the media that harm both sides, right? This is what the world looks like. The deep purple countries have registered major violations based on these seven measures during the pandemic. The blue ones are sort of moderate violations, still worrying, whereas the different shades of green are less worrying, either minor or no violations that we can register. And all these violations that are in the dataset and everything is public, all these violations are documented with official reports and the dataset has links to all the reporting so it's fully transparent and it can be verified. Now, what's happened over time? Well, there is over this period since March 2020, a slight decline in the number of countries engaging in a major or substantial violations. It's most common in the MENA and Asia Pacific still today and has been mostly throughout this period and less common in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa and there you see declines, that's always in Eastern Europe and Asia and less than in Western Europe, North America. So you can see from this that there is a certain relationship also with democracy in the sense that the sort of more high quality developed liberal democracies tend to have less of violations, which is what we would expect, right? And it shows sort of in terms of the number of countries here, if you look at major violations, we registered 37 of them countries in the second quarter of 2020 and it's down to 19 by the quarter, the second quarter, end of second quarter 2021. The maximum count across this period countries that have at some point have had major violations are 44. So substantial, there's not the same start trend with moderate violations. They're going down a little bit, but not as much. And with no violations, no violations, the number of countries have almost doubled, which is of course a positive sign, but we still have a substantial number of countries here that are engaging in either moderate or in major violations. If we look at how these violations are distributed between the seven types of violations, something very worrying appears, it's this. So restrictions on media freedom by far the most common in general, and it's also the category of the type of violation where you find by far the most major violations. You have some amount of all these limits of legislatures and official disinformation campaigns and discriminatory measures and so on, but it's really freedom of expression, media freedom again. The one area that we saw was most severely affected in general over the past 10 years. And during the pandemic, it's also the area that wanna be autocrats or already dictators have targeted the most. Now, one can ask yourselves, okay, so maybe this is justifiable, right? Because in an emergency with a pandemic, we need some harsh measures. That's what President Terta and Prime Minister Orban have claimed. So we looked at that and this is now published in social science and medicine and with some more detail. There's basically no evidence of a trade-off between democracy and avoiding violations and preventing deaths from COVID-19. No relationship whatsoever. So no, violations are in terms of what you're allowed to do as an emergency response from this perspective cannot be justified. Everything also with the pandemic, just like with everything in Vietnam is open source and open access and everything can be accessed, including this dashboard where you can inspect different countries. If you want, it's available freely online and the raw data and everything. Okay, so we have a trend of autocratization that already before the pandemic was accelerating. And with the pandemic, dictators and wannabe dictators have used it especially in the area of freedom of expression and the media to further derail democratic rights and freedoms. This is of course bad from a perspective of human rights and democracy because they have intrinsic value in none of themselves, no other system that we know of in modern history preserve and safeguard the integrity and dignity of human beings. Now, there's also other reasons to be worried about this trend because there is a growing or a set of growing literatures about the dividends of democracy, the effects of democracy on issues that have to do with human security, economic security, social protection, human health, mitigation of climate change and war both international or interstate war and civil war. So we have a lot of issues of civil war. So we with support from the European Commission have started a program that we call Case for Democracy to look at these literatures with a top notch research that has been emerging in the last few years in these areas and what they say about this. So let me give you some quick overview of some of the main messages here. Economic growth and human security in that sense. Scholars like Asimovli and Robinson have shown with very advanced statistical analysis that countries that democratize increase their GDP per capita with 20% versus countries that remain autocracies and also versus if they had stayed autocratic. And it's not only a part of the reason here shown by Karl Henry Knutson is that democracies are better at avoiding the disasters outcomes. So in this graph in the lower right, you can see autocracies on average have a lower growth rate, yes, than democracies, the red line, but also this tail towards negative growth is much, much lower. And it's much more common that democracies, autocracies, sorry, autocracies have negative growth rates and really disastrous growth rates. So democracy and democratization is good for economic growth and for stable predictable growth avoiding catastrophic economic outcomes. And we know catastrophic economic outcomes are terrible for human development and human security. Okay, what about social protection? Especially things that help the poor, right? So social protection schemes. Well, Murshad and his team have shown now with very rigorous analysis of tons of data that democracies and countries that democratize increase their spending on social protection policies. It's even, if you go from no democracy to full democracy on average, you increase the spending on social protection by 100%. Let's go to human security in terms of health, right? Well, again, here we now have a growing number of studies and I'm just highlighting two of them here. Bolchi et al published in British Medical Journal. No, that one is, sorry, that one is in the Lancet actually and then there's another one in BMG. But this is a study published in the Lancet showing that countries that democratize increase the life expectancy in their years following the transition with a significant amount, right? And this one in BMG looked specifically at countries autocratizing in the last 10 years and look at health outcomes and they are worse in every outcome they look at. So countries that autocratize also then have a clear negative effect on human development in terms of health. A third study, sorry, three studies I refer to here Wang Yadal looking at infant mortality show that going from a full autocracy to full democracy means you reduce the, on average, the infant mortality by 94%. That's quite substantial. So this tale that some dictatorships in the world wanna try and sell, i.e. China and so on, that dictatorships are better at producing outcomes like better increased human health and increased economic development and so on, is really false. It's much more common as a dictatorship that you end up as DRC than as China or Singapore. This is now starting to show even in the area of the Anthropocene or mitigating climate change. So again, very rigorous studies, all the data that's there. And in terms of commitments, national commitments, according to the following the Paris Accord, democracies are much more, make much greater commitments. Actually, commitments that amount to, on average, decrease of 1.6 degrees in climate change. That's quite substantial. But also in terms of implementing such commitments, this emerging research increasingly show on this. For example, with air quality and so on. COE emissions, you can go down the line. And finally, this area that we maybe have known most about for a long time, the old argument from Emmanuel Kant that about the democratic peace that democracies don't fight worse with each other. This has now been reconfirmed also using VDM data. And with the wealth of data we have now, can also calculate statistical probabilities for various outcomes. So for example, after India now turned into an electoral autocracy, the odds of a militarized dispute with Pakistan are now three times higher than when it was a democracy. Now, a war between India and Pakistan would be disastrous, of course. But the research now also shows that democracies are not only least prone to have interstate conflict with each other, but also to have internal violent conflicts. So civil war and the like. Now, this relationship everybody should remember is current linear or sort of J-shaped if you put a J horizontally. Because democratization is associated with increased tensions. It's a messy process and is associated with higher probability of internal violent conflict. But then if you reach democracy and become a better democracy, that probability goes down a lot. So the good democracies, that's where you find, by far, the least of internal violent conflicts. And in addition to that, female empowerment, which often comes with democratization, right? Or additionally lower the risk of civil conflict, substantial. And this can also be put in perspective with the current wave of autocratization that is often driven by nationalist, reactionary leaders and parties that also roll back female empowerment, women's rights and girls' children's rights. So all of this, we have summarized them also in what we call policy briefs. Two pages that sort of summarize the main argument and give all the academic literature that it's based on. And they are freely available on the website as well. The website, oh, sorry. You can also access the underlying evidence data, of course, 30 million data points at this time, some 50 plus indices and over 450 indicators. We also have these fun tools to play around with if you're not into statistical analysis and our packages and stuff, you can still access the data using these sets of online tools for analysis to at least do some descriptive analysis, download them and use them freely as you want. On that note, let me say thank you for listening and I look forward to the discussion and the Q&A. Thank you. Thanks Afan, it's excellent. I have obviously a lot of questions and thoughts, but I know that the audience has also been sending in questions here through the chat. So why don't we just turn to the questions if you're ready? I think maybe I'll group them a bit, but maybe we start off with some questions about the data and measurement. So let's start with two questions about that. So one, there's some question here from Fabio Diaz. How do you reconcile the discrepancy between the data and particular cases? In Colombia between 2020, 2021, there were significant human rights violations, yet in the map it appears as if not. So should I give you a couple of questions or would you like to take them over? That's kind of easy. So with the map, if I understand it correctly, this refers to the map with a pandemic backsliding. We only count instances of, say human rights violations that can be clearly tied to the government claiming to be fighting COVID. So there could be human rights violations that are unrelated to COVID and they would not be registered in the pandemic backsliding data. Okay, so then we have a sort of a follow-up on the pandemic backsliding data about from Marta Roy, can you say more about what is a derogation of individual rights during the pandemic? Is the limitation of the individual right not to get vaccinated or not to wear a mask considered a violation? That's getting very specifically into the coding, but. Yeah, well, individual right not to be vaccinated or wear a mask, more commonly, is not necessarily in the UN list of human rights, right? So what you would be talking about is physical integrity, freedom from torture, freedom of expression, the list of non-derogable rights in the UN Charter. Good. So there's a lot of questions here. There's a lot of interest from the audience. Why don't we turn to thinking about some trends going back to some of the trends you presented and thinking about variation across regions? So there's a question here from Olafemi Oladipo. What is the difference between African countries democracy and developed countries democracy? And maybe we could ask more broadly, are there regional trends, regional variation that you would highlight or would you highlight variation across a wealthy countries, middle income countries and low income countries? What sort of variation might you think in groups of countries? Yeah, first I should say that in terms of democracy difference between developed or developing or global south, global north, whatever terminology you wanna use. When we measure democracy, we have a global standard, right? Global both in terms of cost, space in different regions, but also over time. So in that sense, there is no difference, right? You have to be as democratic and in the same way more or less to score equally high on say the liberal democracy. Now, we have called ourselves from the very beginning varieties of democracy, acknowledging that there are different varieties of democracy that are equally democratic, but they have different profiles, if you like. And the most common one we talk about or people like to talk about is liberal democracy or electoral democracy. Those are two different, right? But there are also participatory democracy, egalitarian democracy, and so on. So, but that is not tied to any region. I mean, that could be anywhere, right? So you have when it comes to participatory democracy, right? So yeah, Switzerland, but it's also Uruguay are the ones with most developed participatory democracy. So it's not tied to region and there's no difference between African countries, democracy and developed countries, democracy at all. There are clear differences with regional averages. We all know that Middle East and North Africa is the worst in the world. Those are the taterships there. But Sub-Saharan Africa is also pretty low on average and now sliding back a little bit. So there are regional differences, of course. There's no doubt about that. So there were some more questions about regional differences and one question here from Mirna Lopez. Are there any typical characteristics of autocracy by region? So sort of with particular interest here in Latin America, would there be typical characteristics that you would pull out by region? No, we haven't looked at that that much and in part because we measure sort of the extent to which countries have democratic attributes and then sort of variation between different types of taterships, it's not something we specialize in. But I think, I mean, it's easy to note that in the Middle East and the Gulf and North Africa, you still have these kingdoms and sort of traditional authorities, if you like, to a greater extent. And whereas that, well, except for one case in Africa, that doesn't exist anymore, right? So, yes, there are some regional differences in terms of what type of taterships you have. But it's not something that really VDEM is the best source to look at, I think, then Geddes and her collaborators and their dataset on autocracy is more informative. So this is great. This is really rapid-fire questions. I hope you're, don't mind. Okay, there's a lot of questions here. There's a lot of interest. There was a lot of interest in the discussion also about the work that you presented on the business case for democracy. And especially, yes. Business, not business, no, case. Case, yes. And especially the relationship between democracy and growth. So, I'll give you two of the questions here. So, Emile Buffol, apologies for butchering all names. These are interesting correlations. For instance, economic growth and democracy. However, is it possible to mention some clear causations? For instance, leads to economic growth to democratization or leads democratization to growth. And then a related question here, can we say that democracy is a condition for economic development? So this is a big question in political science, definitely. And, yeah, thoughts. Let me start from the back there. I think that's easiest to answer, and the answer is no. There are dictatorships that have had phenomenal growth rates and still have. And present day China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan during the dictatorship. So, I mean, they all debate about the Asian Tigers. Also, earlier in history, don't forget in the 50s and 60s, Soviet Union grew at the phenomenal rate, right? So there are these instances where you have economic development without democracy. So it's not a condition for economic development. But again, if we look at the history of dictatorships, especially the modern history, if we say how data covers from, well, for some countries from 1789, but most of the countries from 1900. From 1900 to the present, it's very, very rare in terms of sort of country years, in the total amount of country years. It's very, very rare that you have instances of dictatorships that have good economic development. They're really exceptional cases. And we can go down, you know, with China, yeah, good growth rates now. We'll see what happens on the chi in the coming years when he's tightening the screws all over the place. But China was also a dictatorship on the mount. And the outcome was not that good, right? And Russia, sorry, Soviet Union then, understalling the 50s into the 60s, good growth rates, then it wasn't that good, right? So even within country variation, it typically shows that the dictatorships, yeah, they can be good, but it's fairly rare. And it's much more likely to be associated with terrible outcomes. I mean, the outcome of the Mao and the cultural revolution or that was a disaster, also in terms of illnesses and deaths of people. And the same with eventually in Soviet Union, of course. Now, it's not, yeah, come to the issue of causation and correlation. Correlation is not causation. Now, we live in a world where we cannot play around and do experiments with countries, right? I cannot randomly assign a Putin for X number of country years in world history and see what happens. So we are tied to observational data. Look, the observational data have limitations in terms of inferring causation. But the studies that I refer to here are not only some sort of panel time series, correlation, simple stuff. They apply all the most rigorous forms of statistical analysis to control for the possibility of endogenous relationships such as that economic development leads to democratization rather than the other way around. So matching procedures, synthetic controls, and so on and so forth. So it's sort of kind of the best possible we can do. And the most rigorous testing we can do in terms of whether this is just a correlation or is there actually evidence suggesting that we're talking about causation? And these studies clearly show that all the evidence now points towards causation. Democratization leads to higher economic growth. Democracies avoid disastrous economic consequences in to a much greater extent than autocracies. Thinking about sort of turning the relationship around and what's the relationship between economic growth and economic crisis and democratic backsliding or autocratization. I wonder, well, there's a question here and I wonder if you've done work on it or if others at VDEM have been working on this. The question here is from Adelson Sampow. Do you see any relations between this autocracies or between autocratization, the phenomenon that we've been talking about backsliding and the 2008 financial crisis? Yeah, I think that there are no, I haven't seen at least. I haven't seen any sort of definitive studies that can link the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath directly towards autocratization. But let's think about this. What we know from the literature is that financial crisis increases the probability of regime breakdown regardless of the regime you have. So it's economic crisis is bad both for autocracies and democracies. But given that in 2008, the world was populated by a majority of democracies and majority of countries then that were affected by the financial crisis, the risk there was to turn into a no-autocracy and that's what we see happening. There's also a parallel, of course, the other financial crisis is the 1930s and the development of fascism and Nazism and a great number of democracies falling victim to that development, including Germany, that was maybe the most democratic country at the time. The parallel there, of course, is also at least worrying, if not instructive. And then the evolutionary biologists, I work with one in a project called Failing and Successful Sequences of Democratization. And they would tell us, we're still herd animals, right? Our genes haven't shown much change over the past 100 years. We still herd animals, right? And herd animals, in times of crisis, look for a strong leader that can take you out of the crisis. Horses do the same, right? They follow the leader, even if it instinctively goes back into the barn that's on fire. And so we have, they would say, we still have that instinct that when we feel threatened and our livelihood is threatened, maybe our kids and our parents and all that, then we want somebody to come and save us, right? And that opens up for these strong leaders with simple populist messages and say, I can fix this. Follow me and I'll fix it. And they will point to the threats, whether it's migration or it's secularism or it's a lesbian gaze and so on. And find escape codes that needs to be sort of worst case eradicated, right? And use that often as a justification for derailing civil liberties and things like media freedom and suppress civil society and they are foreign agents or something else. And that's a very typical pattern that we see in the data, right? Increasing polarization that's driven and often driven and or at least sort of further cultivated by the populist leaders that have authoritarian tendencies and then using that polarization to scare people further and then use that fear to undermine democratic rights and freedoms and human rights. Fear is a very, very dangerous political force and we know that from the 1930s. So I wanted to pick up on that and you talked in your presentation also about, we see a similar processes of autocratization across countries. So we've got about seven more minutes and I thought it may be a good last set of questions can be around what to do? What can the international community do? What should civil society be doing? What can we be thinking about in terms of response? So I mean, thinking about these processes that you've identified in your work, are there countries where you would identify for particular areas of concern? You would particularly identify and then where would you see areas where the international community or civil society actors might respond? I can also pick up a question here from the Q and A that's along related lines. So this is from Rodrigo Oliveira, one of our PhD or one of our research associates here and he asks, what are your thoughts about the role of social media and fake news and autocratic trends? And how can we deal with it without affecting freedom? So how to respond to these trends that you've identified? Yeah, so yeah, let me start from the back again the social media. I didn't bring up that in my presentation today but we have a sister project or a sort of baby that's been born out of it by some medium folks that's called digital society project and measure among other things than the extent to which governments use social media to spread this information. And that's very clear that it's also governments doing sort of fake news and whatever you wanna call it. It's very clearly associated with auto-creditation. It's one of the tools in the wannabe dictators playbook. And it's often related to this issue that I spoke about to increase polarization, right? Spread fake news about a scapegoat group and about your political opponents and make your followers believe in that false story in order to feel more fear so that you can use that fear and anxiety to further undermine democratic rights and human rights. In addition, of course, we have all these other groups that are not necessarily government controlled although Putin has his troll fabrics and so on, but extreme groups on the rights, religious groups, extremely extremist religious groups and also extremists on the left, although in the current period that's less common and less prominent, who use the social media. And the problem is really, I mean, we know the problem. The problem is that there was this crazy person out there somewhere in a village or a small town and nobody listened, right? Whereas today that crazy person can get all the tens or hundreds of thousands of followers and spread all these conspiracy theories and things to a much wider group. And that's a problem for democracy. If democracy, the discussion, democracy dies with the lies. Democracy is predicated on us knowing what the facts are and facts are facts, whether we believe them or not. And democracy cannot survive when the lies take over. So this is a real dilemma. I think after World War II, the world was, after Nazis, Manfashi, the world was facing, okay, so how do we limit freedom of association in order to save it? And that's why post World War II, Germany, went so far as to sort of outlaw Nazi parties, Nazi symbols and have a constitutional court that can review which parties or organizations are unconstitutional. And their legal system sort of goes not the farthest but far among democracies. It's much less in the US, for example, where you can wave your Nazi flag as much as you want. Now, we are now facing the sort of the equivalent when it comes to freedom of expression. Freedom of expression has become so unregulated in social media and on the net that it's used to undermine democracy and threaten democracy and threaten freedom of expression itself. So what we need to figure out now, and we sort of in some sort of global sense is how to limit freedom of expression in order to save it. There's no doubt in my mind about that. It can come with self-regulation and self-sanitation from the social media companies. I wonder if that's gonna be enough. But I don't have a sort of perfect solution. Here's the silver bullet, right? But it has to be done somehow. That's clear. So maybe I only got to the last question but I apologize for that but I think it's an important one. It's really in terms of democracy especially in the developed sort of long-standing democracies is really a key challenge. I think it's an important point for, certainly speaking to the first question as well with the important point for policymakers to be taking paying attention to. So we're at the end of our time. Unfortunately, we could keep going here because there's a lot of questions in the chat and I certainly have a lot of questions but I need to bring the discussion to a close and maybe this is a good place to do it. This is certainly, as we've seen a moment, a period of concern for democracy and political freedoms and freedom around the world and we should be thinking about what to do as global citizens and as the international community and as members of civil society. So thank you, Stefan, for joining us. Thank you for your lecture and thank you for engaging with all of our questions here and thank you to the audience for great questions and great engagement. Thank you.