Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

Daniel Treisman is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. A graduate of Oxford University (B.A. Hons.) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1995), he has published five books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals including The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review, as well as in public affairs journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.

A former interim lead editor of The American Political Science Review, he has served as associate editor or on the editorial boards of the journals Post-Soviet Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, Economics and Politics, Politeia, and the Russian Journal of Economics. He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has served on the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and as a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics.

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford) and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna) and has received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Smith Richardson Foundation. At UCLA, he has served as acting director of the Center for European and Russian Studies. In the 2021-22 academic year, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and in 2022-4 he will be an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

His latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, is Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21^st Century (Princeton University Press, 2022). His book The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (The Free Press, 2011) was one of the Financial Times’s “Best Political Books of 2011.”