Hanna Folsz Recognized with Three APSA Awards for Research on Autocratization

Three awards from the American Political Science Association. One scholar. Simultaneously. That almost never happens — and the fact that it did should tell you something urgent about the moment we are living through.

The recognition of Hanna Folsz, a Democracy Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), with three APSA awards for her research on autocratization is not simply an academic milestone. It is the political science community sending a collective signal: understanding how democracies die slowly, from the inside, is now the discipline’s most pressing intellectual mission. The stakes run well beyond any university campus.

How the Global Democratic Recession Built the Field That Just Honored Hanna Folsz

The autocratization conversation did not emerge from a vacuum. It was forced into existence by facts that kept accumulating, year after year, until they could no longer be ignored. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2024 Democracy Report, the average global citizen today enjoys a level of democracy last seen in 1985. The numbers are blunt and damning.

The shift matters enormously for understanding why Folsz’s work has resonated across multiple APSA sections simultaneously. The old scholarly infrastructure — built around studying coups, juntas, and naked military seizures of power — was simply not adequate for explaining what happened in Hungary after 2010, Turkey after 2016, or Poland between 2015 and 2023. These were elected governments. They had mandates. They used courts, electoral laws, and media regulation as weapons against the very systems that produced them.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt brought this argument to mainstream readers with their 2018 book How Democracies Die, but the rigorous empirical work of mapping, measuring, and theorizing the mechanisms was left to a new generation of scholars. Folsz is among the most recognized of that generation now. Her positioning at Stanford’s CDDRL — home to Larry Diamond, who coined the term “democratic recession,” former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and Francis Fukuyama — means her findings carry institutional weight that extends directly into policy circles. This is research that gets read in Brussels, in Washington, and at the kind of security forums where Europe’s hardest conversations now happen.

Three Awards, One APSA Annual Meeting, and a Discipline Declaring Its Priorities

The American Political Science Association, founded in 1903, counts over 11,000 members across more than 80 countries. Its annual awards are distributed across dozens of organized sections — Comparative Democratization, Human Rights, Political Institutions, among others. Winning one is a career-defining moment. Winning three at once is extraordinary by any measure.

The 2024 APSA Annual Meeting was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 5–8, 2024. The awards to Folsz span multiple subfields, which signals something specific: her research is not merely technically excellent within one narrow corner of the discipline. It is theoretically generative, empirically grounded, and cross-cutting enough that scholars working in entirely different frameworks all found it valuable.

Here is what the triple recognition specifically demonstrates:

• Breadth of analytical reach — her findings speak to comparative politics, democratic theory, and human rights simultaneously, not just one area
• Methodological rigor — APSA sections reward work that can withstand scrutiny from multiple epistemological directions; three awards means three different methodological communities found her work sound
• Timeliness and urgency — the discipline is consciously elevating scholars who can explain autocratization because policymakers are demanding answers that existing frameworks cannot supply
• Early-career significance — Folsz’s recognition as a Democracy Fellow, not a tenured chair, amplifies the signal; this is the field investing in a new generation, not simply rewarding established names

The specifics of which three APSA sections conferred the awards — likely spanning Comparative Democratization, Human Rights, and Political Institutions — reflect the intersectional nature of autocratization research itself. You cannot study democratic erosion without simultaneously studying institutional decay, rights violations, and comparative political trajectories. Folsz appears to have built a body of work that holds up under all three lenses at once.

Folsz, Diamond, and the Stanford CDDRL Ecosystem That Produced This Research

Hanna Folsz

Hanna Folsz‘s research sits precisely at the intersection of comparative politics and democratic theory, focused on the mechanisms by which democratic systems erode from within rather than being overthrown from without. The distinction is not semantic. It is operationally critical for anyone trying to design policy responses. You cannot apply a coup-prevention toolkit to a situation where the threat is a sitting prime minister packing courts and buying up independent media. Folsz’s work helps map the specific pathways — what comes first, what accelerates decline, what factors correlate with resilience — that policymakers and advocates actually need. The triple APSA recognition suggests she has brought a level of empirical precision to these questions that the field had been searching for.

Larry Diamond and the CDDRL Intellectual Framework

Larry Diamond has been arguing since at least 2008 that the world had entered a democratic recession. His presence at Stanford’s CDDRL shaped an intellectual environment where autocratization was treated as a systemic phenomenon demanding rigorous longitudinal analysis, not a series of isolated national crises to be explained away. Folsz’s fellowship within that environment means her work is embedded in a research tradition that has been building conceptual tools for over a decade. The awards validate not just her individual contribution but the cumulative seriousness of the CDDRL enterprise.

The Broader Stanford FSI Democracy Ecosystem

Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies provides the institutional infrastructure that makes work like Folsz’s possible — access to the V-Dem dataset, connections to Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID, plus a direct pipeline to U.S. foreign policy discussions. When FSI scholars publish, Washington listens. That context amplifies the policy relevance of Folsz’s recognition considerably. Her findings will not sit in a journal and collect dust. They will be cited in EU democracy review processes, congressional research briefs, and international development frameworks — the kind of real-world applications that explain why the EU’s own democracy-linked accession processes have grown so much more sophisticated in recent years.

Why the Academy’s Celebration of Autocratization Research Deserves More Scrutiny

Before we simply applaud the discipline for elevating this research, a harder question deserves attention: is political science studying autocratization in ways that are actually useful, or is it producing elegant frameworks that flatter the analytical preferences of Western liberal institutions without genuinely challenging their assumptions?

The critique is not trivial. Consider three distinct objections:

From critical scholars on the left: The baseline being defended — the liberal democratic order of the 1990s and early 2000s — was never fully democratic for large segments of global populations. Framing any departure from that baseline as “autocratization” risks treating an unequal status quo as a golden age worth restoring. If your metric for democratic quality is primarily procedural — free elections, independent judiciary, press freedom — you can miss the substantive democratic deficits that were generating popular resentment long before Viktor Orbán or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived.

From comparativists studying the Global South: The autocratization literature has been heavily shaped by cases in Europe and the United States. Hungary gets ten times the scholarly attention of comparable backsliding in Bangladesh or Tanzania. The theoretical frameworks that emerge from studying rich, institutionally developed democracies may not travel cleanly to contexts where democratic institutions were always shallow, externally imposed, or politically contested from the outset.

From institutionalists who question the policy translation: Even if the diagnosis is correct, the prescription pipeline is broken. Scholars like Folsz identify mechanisms of erosion with increasing precision, but there is a growing gap between what the research says and what democracy-promotion institutions actually do. The National Endowment for Democracy and USAID have been running democracy support programs for decades with mixed results at best. Does better autocratization research actually change that, or does it simply give the same programs more sophisticated justifications?

None of this diminishes the significance of Folsz’s recognition. It complicates it in the ways that serious scholarship deserves to be complicated. The discipline is right to elevate this research. It should also hold it to the hardest possible standards.

Four Trajectories That Will Determine Whether Folsz’s Research Changes Anything Beyond Academia

Recognition is not impact. Three APSA awards open doors — but which doors Folsz’s research actually walks through over the next five years will determine whether her work reshapes how governments and institutions respond to democratic erosion, or simply advances her career while the erosion continues.

Here are the four concrete scenarios that will play out:

• The policy pipeline opens wide: The triple APSA recognition, combined with Stanford CDDRL’s direct access to U.S. foreign policy circles, positions Folsz’s work to directly inform how institutions like the NED and Freedom House recalibrate their democracy-resilience programming. If her research identifies specific institutional variables that predict resistance to backsliding, that is immediately actionable. The probability of this scenario improves significantly if her findings translate into policy briefs circulated before the next major EU or U.S. democracy summit.

• European democratic conditionality gets sharper tools: The EU has been struggling for years to operationalize its democratic conditionality mechanisms — the Article 7 procedure is widely regarded as politically paralyzed, and the Rule of Law Framework has been inconsistently applied. Rigorous empirical research on autocratization mechanisms could give Brussels the evidentiary foundation to build more precise, legally defensible conditionality triggers. This matters urgently for candidate states and for monitoring existing members.

• A new wave of early-career scholars builds on this foundation: Perhaps the most durable impact of Folsz’s recognition is the signal it sends to graduate students and junior researchers currently deciding what to work on. Three APSA awards to an early-career scholar in this subfield tells a generation of political scientists that autocratization research is where the discipline’s energy and resources are going. The compounding effect of that signal on what gets studied over the next decade is hard to overstate.

• The research collides with political headwinds and stalls: This scenario deserves honest acknowledgment. Democracy-promotion budgets in the United States are under direct political pressure. USAID has faced severe cuts. The political will to fund and act on autocratization research is not guaranteed by the quality of the scholarship. If the institutions that should be translating findings into policy are themselves weakened or politically redirected, the gap between what scholars know and what governments do will widen regardless of how many APSA awards accumulate.

For readers tracking how European security architecture intersects with democratic resilience, it is worth noting that forums like PRIO’s European Security Week are increasingly treating democratic backsliding not as a soft governance issue but as a hard security threat — precisely the kind of conceptual shift that research like Folsz’s makes possible. For ongoing analysis of the institutional dimensions of these debates, our EU political news coverage tracks the policy consequences in real time.

Three awards at a single APSA meeting. The political science community does not hand those out carelessly. What it is really saying is that the question Hanna Folsz has spent her career on — how do democracies die quietly, legally, from the inside — is the question of this political moment. The more important question now is whether the institutions that need the answers are still capable of acting on them.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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