Daniel Treisman

Daniel Treisman is a British-American political scientist. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has also served as interim Director of the Center for European and Russian Studies. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Treisman has published widely on Russian politics and economics, authoritarianism, democratization, political decentralization, and corruption. He also writes regularly for the press and current events publications such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and CNN.com. In 2007-10, Treisman was Acting Lead Editor and then Co-editor of the American Political Science Review. He has spent years as a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna.

Personal background

Treisman was born in Oxford, England, in 1964 but moved to North America at age 13. He attended Prince of Wales Secondary School in Vancouver, British Columbia, before studying for a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford and a Ph.D. in Political Science at Harvard. His mother, Anne Treisman, and father, Michel Treisman, were experimental psychologists, while his stepfather was the Nobel Prize-winning social psychologist and pioneer of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman. Treisman’s older sister, Jessica, is a Professor of Cell Biology at New York University, and his younger sister, Deborah, is Fiction Editor of the New Yorker magazine. He is married to a graphic designer, Susan Landesmann and has two daughters, Alexandra and Lara.

Academic Career

Post-Soviet Russia

In his Ph.D. dissertation, published as the book After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia in 1999, Treisman traced the rise and fall of regional protests and separatism in Russia in the 1990s and argued that the stabilization after 1994 owed much to a Kremlin policy of “selective fiscal appeasement,” which bought off the most mobilized regions with fiscal transfers to prevent a bandwagon from forming.

In subsequent works, he has argued against a view of Russia as unique and constrained to an authoritarian path by its history and culture. In “A Normal Country,” co-authored with the Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, Treisman contended that by the early 2000s Russia had evolved from a collapsing communist state into a “normal, middle-income capitalist economy” which held “generally free—if flawed—elections.” Although distinctive in its vast nuclear arsenal and “pivotal role in international affairs,” Russia resembled other middle-income countries such as Mexico or Malaysia, which suffered from similar problems—widespread corruption, a politicized judiciary and media, “high income inequality, concentrated corporate ownership, and turbulent macroeconomic performance.” Although an average middle-income country was “not a secure or socially just place to live,” the authors rejected extreme characterizations of the country at that time.

The article aroused some controversy, with certain critics arguing that the country was far from normal. One response pointed to Russians’ low and declining life expectancy, while another suggested that the appropriate comparison group was not all middle-income countries but just the relatively successful post-communist states of central Europe (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland).

In the mid-2010s, Treisman recruited a team of mostly Russian scholars and journalists to investigate political decision making under Putin. This resulted in a volume, edited by Treisman, titled The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia. In the Introduction, Treisman argued that Putin’s increasingly authoritarian approach since 2012 aimed to freeze or even reverse the rapid economic and social modernization of the previous decade, which—while boosting living standards—had also sparked protests against the regime. Kremlin political management alternated between two modes—“autopilot,” in which outcomes were decided through vicious battles among elite factions, and “manual control,” in which Putin intervened to dictate outcomes directly. The chapter noted “an apparent narrowing and deterioration in the quality of information the president receives.”

In a chapter on the annexation of Crimea, Treisman characterized the decision to invade as hyper-centralized and impulsive, apparently influenced by fear of losing the Russian naval base in Sevastopol. He described a haphazard, rapidly improvised implementation, with no decision made beforehand about who the region’s new political leader would be. The Crimean episode suggested on Putin’s part “an apparently growing affinity for Pyrrhic victories.”

Treisman has characterized the early Putin as a classic “informational autocrat” or “spin dictator” (see below). He describes Putin since around 2018 as reverting to “fear dictatorship,” based on overt repression.

In an article in 2007, Treisman coined the term “silovarch” to refer to an emerging set of Russian business magnates with backgrounds in the security services and personal ties to Putin. The word combines siloviki, a Russian name for law enforcement professionals, and oligarch, a term for politically influential businessmen.

Corruption

Treisman was one of the first scholars to use indexes of “perceived corruption” in the 1990s to explore why the quality of governments around the world differed so greatly. In a widely cited article, he found that higher economic development, British colonial heritage, Protestantism, and a long history of democracy correlated with cleaner government, while federal structure was associated with more corruption.

Treisman later became skeptical that such indexes, constructed from experts’ subjective ratings, were reliable measures of corruption rather than reflections of countries’ international reputations. Expert ratings, while correlating strongly with variables such as colonial heritage, religion, and even the proportion of women in government, often correlated weakly if at all with citizens’ responses in surveys about their direct experience with demands for bribes. Treisman suggested that experts might be using well-known or observable factors such as colonial heritage, religion, and gender balance to infer the level of corruption rather than those factors actually determining how much corruption existed.

Political decentralization

In a series of articles, many co-authored with the economist Hongbin Cai, Treisman explored the consequences of political and fiscal decentralization. He used formal models and empirical analysis to reexamine a number of common claims—investigating, for instance, whether political decentralization encourages local governments to improve performance in order to attract mobile capital, stimulates greater policy experimentation, weakens the central state, or increases inflation. Cai and Treisman also scrutinized claims that political decentralization was a major cause of China’s rapid economic development, reaching a skeptical conclusion.

In The Architecture of Government, Treisman addressed a series of classic arguments about decentralization, modeling their logic, and showed that almost none were likely to hold in general. He argued that because multiple effects push in opposite directions, it is difficult to know when a particular decentralizing reform will be beneficial and when harmful. He concluded that: “no robust, general consequences of political decentralization have been—or are likely to be—identified.”

Democracy and authoritarianism

Treisman has participated in debates over the role of economic development in supporting democracy. He has proposed a “conditional modernization theory,” in which economic development creates a potential for stable democracy, but the exact timing of transitions depends on contingent events and decisions of leaders. In one 2015 article, he showed that higher national income is associated with transitions to democracy, but only in the medium run. A change of the top leader is often necessary to trigger reform, and leader turnover occurs only periodically. He illustrated with the example of Spain, where GDP per capita increased for decades without causing any observable softening of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Shortly after the dictator died in 1975, however, the country leapt to a much higher level of democracy.

Arguing against theories that explain the introduction of democracy as a rational choice by incumbent autocrats, Treisman has argued that such transitions more often result from the dictator’s errors. Examining 316 historical episodes of democratization, he found that the details of these were consistent with deliberate choice by the leader in about one third of cases. In more than two thirds, according to Treisman, some significant blunder contributed. Common errors included underestimating the strength of opposition and failing to react, overestimating the leader’s own popularity and calling elections only to lose them, starting unsuccessful wars, and sliding down the “slippery slope” of self-weakening concessions.

In other work, Treisman has expressed skepticism about the extent of “democratic recession” in the 2010s and 2020s. In a 2023 article, he pointed out that most indicators actually suggested at most a modest decline in the global share of democracies. Statistical estimations implied that what backsliding had occurred since 2000 could be explained by the relatively poor and democratically inexperienced character of most countries that became democratic in the “Third Wave” between 1974 and 2005.

In 2022, together with the Russian French economist Sergei Guriev, Treisman published Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2022). The book, which built on several journal articles, explored how authoritarian governments had been changing in previous decades. Fewer dictators were using overt violent repression to intimidate the public and more were, instead, faking democracy and manipulating media to persuade citizens that they were effective and benevolent leaders. The authors characterize this as a shift in the global balance away from “fear dictatorship” to “spin dictatorship,” also termed “informational autocracy.” The book won several prizes and was translated into 13 languages, including French, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese.

Awards

• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023.
• Prix Guido et Maruccia Zerilli-Marimo de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Paris, 2023, for Spin Dictators.
• Arthur Ross Book Prize Bronze Medal, 2023, for Spin Dictators.
• Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, 2022-4.
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2002-3.

Selected publications

• Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, with Sergei Guriev, Princeton University Press, April 2022.
• The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia, ed. Daniel Treisman, Brookings Institution Press, 2018.
• The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev, The Free Press, 2011
• The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia, with Andrei Shleifer, 2000, MIT Press.
• After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia, 1999, University of Michigan Press.
• “Democracy by Mistake: How the Errors of Autocrats Trigger Transitions to Democracy,” American Political Science Review, 2020, 114(3), pp.792-810.
• “Economic Development and Democracy: Predispositions and Triggers,” Annual Review of Political Science, 2020, Vol. 23, 2020, pp. 241-57. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050718-043546.
• “Informational Autocrats,” with Sergei Guriev, Journal of Economic Perspectives, November 2019, 33(4): 100-27. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.33.4.100.
• “Misperceiving Inequality,” with Vladimir Gimpelson, Economics and Politics, March 2018.
• “Jurisdiction Size and Local Government Policy Expenditure: Assessing the Effect of Municipal Amalgamation,” with Jens Blom-Hansen, Kurt Houlberg, and Søren Serritzlew, American Political Science Review, November 2016.
• “Income, Democracy, and Leader Turnover,” 2015. American Journal of Political Science, 59(4): 927-42.
• “Presidential Popularity in a Hybrid Regime: Russia under Yeltsin and Putin,” 2011. American Journal of Political Science 55 (3): 590-609.
• “‘Loans for Shares’ Revisited,” Post-Soviet Affairs, 26, 3, July-September 2010, 207-27.
• “Political Decentralization and Policy Experimentation,” with Hongbin Cai, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 1, 2009.
• “Political Decentralization and Corruption: Evidence from Around the World,” with C. Simon Fan and Chen Lin, Journal of Public Economics, 93, 1-2, 2009.
• “Putin’s Silovarchs,” Orbis, Winter 2007.
• “What Have We Learned About the Causes of Corruption from Ten Years of Cross-National Empirical Research?” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol.10, June 2007.
• “Did Government Decentralization Cause China’s Economic Miracle?” with Hongbin Cai, World Politics, July 2006.
• “Does Competition for Capital Discipline Governments? Decentralization, Globalization, and Public Policy,” with Hongbin Cai, American Economic Review, June 2005.
• “A Normal Country: Russia After Communism,” with Andrei Shleifer, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19, 1, Winter 2005, pp.151-74 (shorter version published in Foreign Affairs, March-April 2004).
• “Rational Appeasement,” International Organization, Spring 2004, 58, 2, pp.345-73.
• “State Corroding Federalism,” with Hongbin Cai, Journal of Public Economics, March 2004, 88, pp.819-43.
• “Decentralization and Inflation: Commitment, Collective Action, or Continuity?” American Political Science Review, 94, 4, December 2000, pp.837-57.
• “The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Public Economics, 76, 3, June 2000, pp.399-457.

External links

• Daniel Treisman’s website
• Russia Political Insight
• Spin Dictators page