Nobel laureate and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Daron Acemoglu said the spread of free information can undermine autocracy, speaking to an audience at Boston College’s McMullen Museum Thursday.
“A more resilient, better liberal democracy has to start by going much more to the people, which means their economic priorities, more of their cultural language, and pulling away from cultural priorities of the elite,” Acemoglu said. “That can be facilitated with much better communication.”
Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on prosperity inequality among nations, spoke as part of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy’s Spring 2026 Symposium on Democratic Resilience.
He presented research from his forthcoming book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which provides quantitative evidence for the success of democracies in delivering prosperity, public goods, and freedoms to the masses, and offers suggestions for how this style of government may defend itself against autocratic attacks.
“If democracy, at least historically, has worked quite well in terms of both aggregate growth and delivering for people who are, say, ‘regular’ people in terms of education, health, income distribution, etc., why this turn against democracy?” Acemoglu said.
Once democratic governments come to power—delivering economic prosperity, controlling corruption, and promoting peace—people tend to hop on board, Acemoglu said. But under authoritarian regimes, he added, people may never be exposed to democracy’s benefits.
“The problem is, well, in many countries, democracy is down,” Acemoglu said. “Authoritarian, populist governments are in power. So can democracy even have that check?”
To explore the possibilities of democratic rebound under autocracy, Acemoglu and his co-researchers traveled to his native country, Turkey, where democracy has eroded significantly since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power in 2003. Even so, the country still holds elections and counts votes.
To Acemoglu, this political environment was a perfect testing ground for quantifying how free information may affect political behavior in a repressive setting.
“We wanted to see how people would change their beliefs, their plans for voting, and their actual votes when given accurate information presented in a nonpartisan manner,” Acemoglu said.
They started canvassing, asking voters door-to-door and via an online survey how democratic they thought their country was. Participants who supported the ruling party—the Adalet ve Kalkinma Party (AKP)—estimated that Turkey was much more democratic than international metrics would suggest, while those opposed to the AKP made judgments closer to reality.
They then showed the participants non-partisan, academic studies proving that the country had poor democratic institutions. As a result, participants who initially supported the AKP were more likely to vote against the ruling party in the next election.
“It turns out that this information, at least in this study, both online and in the field, actually gets its bite on people who had the misperception,” said Acemoglu. “It changes the minds of people who thought Turkey had become more democratic.”
But the change didn’t end there. Eleven months later, long after the researchers had stopped canvassing, local elections took place. When the researchers examined the results of those elections, they found that the effects held—the people who had been swayed from the AKP by objective information continued to vote for the opposition.
“People did take that information into account,” Acemoglu said. “They changed their view about what happened to democracy and whether democracy was something completely useless or not.”
Acemoglu acknowledged, though, that the “non-partisan” information he found so transformative may be increasingly difficult to cultivate in a polarized era, especially in a country like the United States.
“I hope we’re not at that point that no non-partisan source can exist, but perhaps we are,” Acemoglu said. “I’m taking it as given that we’re not.”
Acemoglu concluded with guarded optimism, saying that if cultural considerations are taken seriously, information can revive democracy under duress.
“People are not completely blind to information,” Acemoglu said. “So some of this may or may not work, but at least it sort of gives some liberal hope.”
