Foreword: Protecting global freedom in an age of rising autocracy

Will 2012 turn out to have been the high-water mark of human liberty? This volume documents that the downward trend in freedom and democracy, which started then, has continued for another year in 2024. Yet this Atlas also reminds us that there is hope amidst this adverse aggregate trend. In much of the world, women’s economic freedom is higher today than it was thirty years ago. Western Europe’s freedom is either unchanged or greater than it was fifteen years ago. The Global South is steadily becoming more prosperous.

The decline in freedom documented in this volume is clear, but it is also not a massive shift. Average global freedom has moved from Montenegro to Malawi, not from Sweden to Laos. Yet we can no longer maintain a Whiggish faith that we are on an inexorable path toward freedom, democracy, and prosperity, or that history has ended. As the fires of war burn in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Sudan, we must ask what has gone wrong, and what we can do about it. Measurement is the first task, and that is why this overview of liberty around the world is important.

The first section of this Foreword discusses the changing nature of the threat to freedom, and presents one hypothesis about rising executive aggrandizement. There has been a significant decline in the prevalence of coups since the 1960s, which means that democratically elected leaders need fear the “man on horseback” much less than in the past. Yet as the threat of military takeovers has fallen, the prevalence of “executive aggrandizements,” in which duly elected leaders push their power beyond constitutional limits, has not. Indeed, elected executives may be more likely to take risks precisely because military coups have become less plausible.

I present a simple framework for thinking about the interplay between technology and executive aggrandizement. Executives are limited by their ability to control the public sector and by popular opposition. Technology can enable the coordination of popular anti-regime action, as was shown vividly in the Twitter Revolutions of the Arab Spring. The increased threat of popular uprising may put limits on some political leaders, but technology can also increase the executive’s ability to control the public sector by monitoring disloyalty or malfeasance. Artificial intelligence (AI) could improve the central government’s ability to detect corruption. If the state is initially weak, the positive impact of technology on popular opposition may lead to less dictatorship. However, if the state is strong, technology will instead reduce the limits on executive activity.

The second section of this Foreword argues that geopolitical changes can also help explain why executive aggrandizement has increased and coups have fallen. Western powers, which used to engineer coups as Cold War policy, now intervene to reverse them. Even more importantly, the influence of the West, which championed democracy in the years after the Cold War, has declined. The 1990s was an era of democratic triumph, in which the strength of liberal democracies was at its apogee. What could have been more appealing to the former Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe than to rush toward European integration and prosperity? Mexico’s leaders similarly saw great advantages in tying their country to the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In both cases, democracy ended up being the price of free trade.

Yet the last quarter century has seen a relative decline in the Western champions of liberty. The United States lost military face in its failed occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and economic face in the global financial crisis. The economic importance of the European Union (EU) has declined, while China’s economic heft has expanded enormously. China’s growth provides an example of non-democratic success, and its foreign aid reduces the advantage of courting Western donors who have a deeper demand for democratic reform.

In the final section of the Foreword, I discuss the interplay between economic and political freedom. While I do not believe that complete economic freedom is necessary for political freedom, I do believe that a political executive with control over parts of the economy can use that control to augment its own political power. There are risks in supporting activist industrial and trade policies that enable political leaders to reward their supporters and punish their opponents. It would be far better for democratic leaders to articulate the positive case for freedom, which can both enable economic growth and empower human happiness, than to seek to micromanage the economy.

The man on horseback vanishes while executive aggrandizement persists

Bermeo documents that more than one-third of democracies faced coups between 1960 and 1964, and 15 percent of democracies were toppled by coups between 1965 and 1969. In every five-year interval since 1985, fewer than 5 percent of democracies fell to a coup. In every five-year interval since 1995, fewer than 10 percent of democracies have even faced the threat of a coup. Yet, as this volume documents, the global level of freedom has been declining since 2012.

Executive aggrandizement, where the executive expands its authority beyond constitutional limits, can erode freedom without the fireworks of a coup. Yet it has proven difficult to document a global wave in such expansions of incumbent power. Nevertheless, there are important examples, especially those of China, Russia, and Venezuela, in which political executives have significantly increased their power. Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez represent the more standard case in which a democratically elected executive expands his power. In the case of China, the more dispersed control of party leaders has been replaced by the more centralized control of Xi Jinping.

In this section, I first discuss the interplay between coups and executive aggrandizement, using Argentina’s 1930 coup as an example. I then turn to a framework that is meant to suggest how technological change might have influenced the prevalence of coups, protests, and executive aggrandizement. I focus on domestic forces that influence freedom in this section, and in the next section, I will focus on the role of foreign influence.

Coup and executive aggrandizement

Few coups seem so consequential as the 1930 coup in Argentina, which ended seventy-five years of political stability and liberal government and ushered in fifty years of coups and dictatorships. Argentina’s remarkable Generation of 1837, which included Domingo Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi, crafted that country’s 1853 Constitution and presided over a period of increasing freedom, wealth, and education. Like Britain before 1867, nineteenth-century Argentina was better at protecting freedoms than at promoting broad, uninfluenced suffrage, but after 1912, the Sáenz Peña Law made male suffrage universal, secret, and mandatory.

The Radical Civic Union (UCR) rode to power on the basis of broad population support in 1916, and came into conflict with the more conservative National Autonomist Party (PAN), which had held power since the end of Sarmiento’s presidency in 1874. Their conflict ended in 1930, when a military coup replaced the elected President Hipólito Yrigoyen with Lieutenant General Uriburu. Alemán and Saiegh provide evidence against “the claim that demands for drastic redistribution led to democratic breakdown is not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup.” Instead, they see the coup as a response to the fact that Yrigoyen “used his authority to exclude the political opposition and take away their remaining bases of power.”

Alemán and Saiegh emphasize that the legislative divisions were not determined by ideology or attitudes toward redistribution. Instead, divisions were heightened over power plays, such as the frequent Federal “interventions” in which Yrigoyen replaced provincial governments with politicians that were more to his liking. While these interventions were and are (the last one occurred in 2004) supposed to be responses to unusual and deeply problematic local circumstances, there were twenty interventions during Yrigoyen’s first term and fifteen of these were done without legislative approval. During Yrigoyen’s second term, “between 1928 and 1929, he took over by executive decree the provinces of San Juan, Mendoza, Corrientes and Santa Fe,” and he nationalized the petroleum industry, which was also “seen as a political power-grab.”

On August 9, 1930, the opposition published the Manifesto of the 44 which denounced Yrigoyen for aggrandizement of executive authority. Within the month, a coup had begun and by September 10, Uriburu had replaced Yrigoyen as President of Argentina. Six more coups would follow in 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1976, and 1981. Executive aggrandizement is a perpetual possibility, and, historically, the opponents of that aggrandizement often came from within the government, including from within the military.

Of course, there have been many cases of executive aggrandizement that have not met with opposition from the military. It took eleven years, and the realization that Hitler had led them into a military catastrophe, for any of the Wehrmacht’s leaders to fight against Hitler’s subversion of the Weimar Republic. Similarly, there have been many military coups that had little or nothing to do with executive aggrandizement, including Argentina’s 1943 coup, and the attempted coups in France in 1961, and Spain in 1981.

These two failed coups suggest that improvements in communications have reduced the ability of officers to command their soldiers to fight against political leaders. Improvements in information technology have made it easier for symbolically important legitimate leaders to communicate directly with the army, which can be effective because “military forces—especially perhaps conscript ones—are susceptible to numerous pressures from the civilian population and from civil institutions.”

During the weekend on April 22, 1961, a junta of French officers, hoping to keep Algeria an integral part of France, took control of Algiers. As Thomas writes, “de Gaulle’s military resources were unimpressive,” because “500,000 [soldiers] were in Algeria, whereas in France itself there were very few regular operational units.” Instead of fighting, on the evening of April 23, De Gaulle took to the radio.

The same voice that had travelled the airwaves in 1940 denouncing “the capitulation” to Nazi Germany in the name of “honor, common sense, and the higher interest of the Nation,” and inviting “all the French who want to remain free to listen to me and to follow me,” declared in 1961 that “I forbid every Frenchman, and in the first place every soldier, to carry out any order.” Even though the rebels controlled the Algiers stations, they could not stop ordinary citizens and soldiers from hearing De Gaulle on their transistor radios, and turning against the plot. The defeat of the coup has been called “la Victoire des Transistors.”

On the evening of February 23, 1981, armed agents of Spain’s Civil Guard, led by a Lieutenant Colonel, took control of the Congress of Deputies. In Valencia, General del Bosch rolled out his tanks and declared a state of emergency. Del Bosch had fought under Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and under German Command during World War II, and he wanted to stop Spain’s shift to liberal democracy. But at 1:14 a.m., King Juan Carlos appeared on television in the uniform of the Captain General of the Army and declared that “the Crown cannot tolerate in any form any act which tries to interfere with the constitution which has been approved by the Spanish people.” The coup promptly fizzled, and Spain’s democracy would survive.

In both France and Spain, coups were stopped by leaders who broadcast strong messages which fundamentally undermined their military subordinates. The framework in the next section will argue that improvements in communications technology more generally make it easier for leaders to stop rebellions from within. This is one hypothesis as to why the risks to freedom now come more from executive aggrandizement than from military coups.

Yet there are other reasons why the frequency of coups has declined, most notably the end of the Cold War and the changing behavior of Western powers. During the Cold War, American leaders often preferred a friendly military regime or monarchy to a hostile democratic one, and the US government supported coups from Tehran in 1953 to Chile in 1973. Since 1991, US-led regime change has meant overt invasion far more than covert coups. In 1994, the United States even acted to reinstate President Aristide of Haiti, who had been ousted by a coup in 1991. I will return to the role of the West in promoting democracy in the next section, after first providing a framework for thinking about the interplay between technology and constraints on political leaders.

Technology and constraints on chief executives

The section considers two impacts of improved information technology on the limits facing elected executives or autocrats. Information can be used to organize protests, such as the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Egypt, which brought down the Mubarak regime in 2011, and that places limits on executive action. But information technology can also be used to centralize control over the public sector, such as by granting leaders the ability to communicate directly with soldiers during a coup. I will not focus on other impacts of communications technology, such as enabling leaders like India’s Narendra Modi to bond with their voters by using radio broadcasts and social media.

All actions that an executive might want to take will create some opposition from both the private and public sectors. That opposition places limits on the actions of the executive. I assume that the executive will not risk actions that generate sufficient opposition from either the public sector, which might refuse to implement the action, or the private sector, which might break out into mass protests. If technology expands the range of actions that the executive can take, then the technology is authority-enhancing, but if it contracts the range of executive action, then it is authority-eroding.

The limits on an autocrat’s options are captured by the two solid lines in Figure 1. If the autocrat wants to limit their opposition from either sector to a fixed amount, then his or her options are limited to a rectangle that is below the solid blue line and to the left of the solid orange line. I will argue that recent changes in communications technology have given effective autocrats more power over their own bureaucracies, causing the blue line to rise, but made private opposition more effective by enabling organization, which shifts the orange line to the left.

While China’s surveillance of its own private citizens is frequently discussed in the Western media, the surveillance of public sector workers and the associated anti-corruption campaign has been far more central to Xi Jinping’s centralization of power. The bribery convictions of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang in 2013 and 2015 eliminated two potential rivals early in Xi’s term as president of China. Moreover, because China has “vague and incomplete anti-corruption laws that leave more room for party control,” and “institutional arrangements that centralize control over local anti-corruption agencies,” the fight against corruption essentially gives national leadership the ability to discipline a large swath of the public sector.

Figure 1. The autocrat’s options and technological change

Complaints by ordinary citizens play a significant role in China’s anti-corruption campaign, and those complaints are often transmitted electronically. Pan and Chen report that “China has devoted substantial resources to monitoring the performance of lower-tier officials” including “telephone hotlines,” “government-managed websites where citizens can complain online,” and “web and mobile apps designed for individuals to complain to the government.” In order to reduce bribery, some Chinese “hospitals even put in place monitoring systems with facial recognition technology to identify unregistered medical representatives or unapproved visits.” Fan et al. document that computerizing value-added tax invoices “contributed to 27.1 percent of VAT revenues and 12.9 percent of total government revenues in the five subsequent years.” Beraja et al. examine artificial intelligence procurement across China and find that “autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial-recognition AI as a new technology of political control, and increased AI procurement indeed suppresses subsequent unrest.”

If laws are sufficiently fuzzy, then abundant electronic monitoring, supplemented by the complaints of random citizens, should make it possible to convict almost any public servant. That ability to convict provides a chief executive with enormous control over the public sector. Information technologies, such as the on-board computers carried by commercial truckers, have long been used by corporate chieftains to monitor their workers. There is every reason to believe that government leaders should be able to do the same, and that better technology will strengthen the hold of authoritarian leaders over public sector employees.

For that reason, Figure 1 depicts the blue line rising higher because of better monitoring technology. As the autocrat has an increasing ability to repress opposition within the public sector through better monitoring, they have a greater ability to undertake activities, from suppressing religious minorities to invading their neighbors, that might have been opposed by some public sector workers. This increased range of executive power provides one reason why information technology can lead to less individual freedom. This effect should be much stronger in countries with a more effective public sector.

Better technology can also give the public sector more ability to monitor their private citizens, but there is a countervailing force that I suspect is more important worldwide. Information technology also enables the coordination of citizens, especially through the sharing of information. Historically, cities have been hotbeds of regime change, partially because density enabled the coordination of opposition to the government. Information technology makes it easier to spread information both about why someone should protest and where a protest will occur.

In 2011, protests were coordinated on Twitter in Tunisia and Egypt and two autocrats were forced out of power. In 2022, Maria Litvina called for protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Instagram. While she was arrested, thousands still took to the streets and protests in Russia have continued since then. While the Putin regime does not seem to be in danger, this activity still creates direct and indirect costs for the government, including the challenge of locking up thousands and potential embarrassment on the world stage.

In Figure 1, I chose to capture the ability of improved private coordination as empowering private protest against government, which increases the costs to governments of taking actions that generate private opposition, which shifts the orange line to the left. Consequently, it is unclear whether technology will reduce freedom, by strengthening executives’ controls over their bureaucracies, or increase freedom, by making citizen protest easier. In countries that have large and capable public sectors, such as those in East Asia, I suspect that technology will typically be freedom-reducing. In places where the public sector is weak, then technology seems more likely to encourage regime change, which may lead autocrats to be more cautious.

The core hypothesis put forth in this section is that technology has centralized authority within the government, which can reduce freedom for the rest of us. Direct communication between legitimate leaders and soldiers has reduced the threat of coups. Better monitoring of subordinates has reduced local corruption. The implication of this change is that the centralized authority of autocrats has increased. We now turn to a second hypothesis: that the decline in freedom is associated with the relative weakness of the West.

The decline of the West and the limits on autocracies

The 1990s were a strange time in world history. The Soviet Union was no more. Liberal democracies had triumphed, and they were much wealthier than their alternatives. They were role models for countries emerging from communism. Moreover, the Western democracies were successful enough that they could indulge in the luxury of encouraging others to embrace democracy.

Levitsky and Way emphasize the “international dimension of regime change” and especially the power of “linkage” or “the density of ties (economic, political, diplomatic, social, and organizational) and cross-border flows (of trade and investment, people, and communication) between particular countries and the United States, the European Union (EU), and Western-led multilateral institutions.” These ties led Latin American and Central European countries to democratize in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The two democratizing nations that Levitsky and Way highlight were strongly influenced by the EU and NAFTA. In Slovakia, Vladimír Mečiar “regained control of the government and rapidly sought to eliminate major sources of opposition” and “in the absence of extensive linkage to the West, Mečiar’s autocratic government might well have consolidated power.” But the appeal of access to EU was enormous, and “it employed conditionality in 1997 by rejecting Slovakia’s request to begin accession negotiations due to a failure to meet democratic criteria.” This rejection had political bite, and “Slovakia’s failure to move towards EU membership, for which the EU directly (and very publicly) blamed Mečiar, created a salient electoral issue that benefited the opposition.” In 1998, Slovakia rejected Mečiar and the country has been democratic since then.

The authoritarian PRI (Institutional Revolution Party) controlled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, but the technocratic leadership of the party during the 1990s saw the tremendous economic advantages that could come by enacting NAFTA. While “successive U.S. administrations backed the PRI governments and explicitly excluded democracy from NAFTA negotiations… NAFTA increased Mexico’s salience in the U.S. political arena,” and “as NAFTA negotiations began, the PRI was subjected to intense international scrutiny, including unprecedented media coverage of electoral scandals and US congressional hearings on Mexican human rights”. Mexico’s attempt to placate the United States meant that “by the late 1990s opposition forces had strengthened to the point where they could win national elections” and that “preventing such an outcome would have required large scale fraud or repression, which, given Mexico’s international position, would have been extremely costly.”

Both of these case studies suggest that EU and US influence encouraged democracy in the 1990s either through clear conditionality (as with Slovakia) or through the court of US public opinion (as with Mexico). The democratizing push reflected the Western victory in the Cold War. That victory meant that Western powers looked like role models, and that access to Western markets was enormously profitable. Unlike during the Cold War, when the United States was eager for allies of any political variety, in the 1990s, the West felt sufficiently secure that they could risk alienating countries by pushing democracy.

Indeed, the level of American confidence reached such heights that the United States waged wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq with a stated goal of regime change. When President Bush addressed the nation on October 7, 2001, he said our goal in invading Afghanistan was to “defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.” Two years later, when announcing the invasion of Iraq, President Bush reiterated “we will bring freedom to others and we will prevail” and “we have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.” I am not claiming that promoting democracy was the primary objective of either war, but just that a significant number of policymakers believed that it was reasonable to go to war to promote freedom elsewhere.

Those wars were two reasons for the decline in US influence since 2006. While the US military readily defeated the armed forces of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government failed to establish lasting democracies in either country. Moreover, the US management of both occupations appeared incompetent to many global observers. The disastrous collapse of an American housing bubble then brought economic suffering not only to the United States but to the world. The United States started to seem far less like a role model, and a less triumphant United States was less likely to take on the mission of democratizing the world.

Europe’s economic clout has also waned over the last thirty years. While the EU produced one-fourth of the world’s gross domestic product in 1990 (at purchasing power parity prices), it produced less than 15 percent of global output in 2024. After 2005, Turkey seemed poised to join the EU, but it never came to be, partially because many Turks opposed EU membership. One Turkish poll in 2013 reported that “while one third of those surveyed agreed Turkey should persevere with the goal of becoming an EU member, two-thirds of the public lean closer to the view that Turkey should not become a full member.” Given those views, it is unsurprising that President Erdoğan supported a political referendum that would entrench his presidential power despite the risk that such a move would alienate the EU.

Europe’s relative economic heft has diminished, partially because of the growth of China. Between 1990 and 2024, China’s share of the world economy rose from 3.6 percent to 19.05 percent. A strong and wealthy China provides an alternative, non-democratic role model, and access to Chinese aid and markets most certainly does not require democratizing reform. Shinn and Eisenman write that “China’s focus on state sovereignty and reluctance to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations have assisted its ability to develop cordial ties with Africa.” Democratic powers are far less dominant now than they were twenty years ago, and that can help explain why freedom has declined since 2012.

Economic and political freedom

Declining belief in the value of economic freedom in the West may also contribute to declining political freedom both in the Western democracies and elsewhere. Milton Friedman famously saw a particularly tight link between economic and political freedom, writing that “capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.” Similarly Hayek saw economic planning as leading down the “road to serfdom.” Critics of this perspective have pointed out that the Scandinavian social democracies seem to have enjoyed almost perfect political freedom, even when their economies looked decidedly non-capitalistic. They have also noted that East Asian economies with very limited political freedom have occasionally been hotbeds of capitalism.

Yet even if Friedman’s statement goes too far, there is an essential truth in his perspective. When the public sector has more discretion to interfere with the economy, then it will also have more ability to reward its supporters and punish its opponents. Hugo Chávez’s direct control over Venezuela’s petroleum enabled his domestic and foreign activities, including subsidizing friendly neighbors with cheap oil. Relief from regulation has been one of the most common sources of illicit public revenues throughout history, and those revenues can also be used to enhance political power.

But as the example of Scandinavia illustrates, not all economic interventions empower political executives. If the rules are decided collectively and enforced strictly, then they are not a source of power for the executive. If the rules are ad hoc and decided by the executive on the spot, then economic intervention can help consolidate political strength. In Chávez’s Venezuela or the Shah’s Iran, public oil revenues became a tool for tyranny. In Norway, they did not, partially because oil revenues go largely into a sovereign wealth fund that is managed by the politically independent Norges Bank.

Yet in recent years, political leaders in the United States and EU have championed economic policies, including industrial policy and tariffs, that are largely discretionary. If a politician seeks support from domestic producers of some product, then that politician can reward those producers either with subsidies, now called industrial policy, or with a selective tariff on that product. The politicization of US pre-World War II tariffs generates little hope that any future discretionary tariff policy will somehow be divorced from politics. Moreover, even if the United States limits its discretionary interventions, public support for these policies, from both parties, reinforces the idea that political leaders should have the right to favor some industries over others.

The case for economic freedom would be strong even if there was not a link between economic and political freedom. Yet, as long as economic policy Edward L. Glaeser interventions provide more scope for political leaders to reward and punish, then these interventions will also pose risks to political freedom. If the leaders of the West want to reverse the downward trend in freedom, then they should continue championing both political and economic liberty and continue to be engaged with the world.

Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp professor of economics at Harvard University, where he has taught microeconomics and urban economics since 1992. Glaeser previously directed the Taubman Center and the Rappaport Institute. He also leads the Urban Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-leads the Cities Programme at the International Growth Centre, and is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Glaeser has written hundreds of papers on cities, political economy, and public economics. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992.

The and its staff, fellows, and directors generate their own ideas and programming, consistent with the Council’s mission, their related body of work, and the independent records of the participating team members. The Council as an organization does not adopt or advocate positions on particular matters. The Council’s publications always represent the views of the author(s) rather than those of the institution.

2024 Atlas: Freedom and Prosperity Around the World

Twenty leading economists and government officials from eighteen countries contributed to this comprehensive volume, which serves as a roadmap for navigating the complexities of contemporary governance. 

The Freedom and Prosperity Center aims to increase the prosperity of the poor and marginalized in developing countries and to explore the nature of the relationship between freedom and prosperity in both developing and developed nations.

Image: A view of a protest supporting a teachers’ strike outside of the Municipal Assembly in Rio de Janeiro October 7, 2013. The protest is to demand changes in the public state and municipal education system. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes