My suggestion here is to flip Scott’s script: Populations also judge states by metrics that are legible–to populations. Populations can see some things better than others, and they judge states according to their own uneven vision. This remains true, and may even become more true, in the ages of mass and social media.

It should be no surprise that states have begun to respond. They have begun to hide the things that matter, and to make more legible the things that are popularly associated with democracy, but that do not matter very much.

A good modern autocrat might advise as follows: Don’t be like 1984. Conduct no great purges of the Party. Keep the show trials few. All you really need, as in Russia, are a few unacknowledged assassinations that hardly bear mention. Sporadic, unacknowledged killings are a lot less legible. For that very reason their practical effects are deeper: You want people to think that the beliefs of those around them arose spontaneously and were not the mere result of culling the herd. Preference falsification works better that way.

New‐​style tyranny has also found that ideology is basically useless: Don’t write your ideas in a book, because books are unyielding, and one day a book might be used against you. Don’t raise up a class of intellectuals, because intellectuals are quibblers, and quibbling people make trouble. (Trouble, in this vernacular, is another word for “the possibility of freedom.”) As Hannah Arendt noted, ideologues at least stand for something, and standing for something can become inconvenient.

It’s a fairly antique autocracy that doesn’t even bother to hold fake elections. They all do that, and they have done so for years. And yet fake elections in the high style — the kind with only one candidate on the ballot, and where the winner takes 99% of the vote–are outmoded. People have caught on to that kind of thing.

The modern approach, as pioneered by Iran, is to hold elections that are free, fair, open, plural, and yet strangely inconsequential: All of the difficult questions have been settled before the voting takes place. In Iran, only Islamist parties may operate or run candidates for office. Parties may be banned at any time for holding the wrong views or otherwise making trouble. Individual candidates are pre‐​approved, or not, by a Guardian Council controlled by religious hardliners. The Guardian Council may disqualify any candidate, even sitting officeholders. Its decisions are final, and its members are never accountable to the public.

But hey, there are elections, right?

In a smart authoritarianism, the pageantry of the contested election is carefully preserved. Thus if anyone raises a democratic protest, the first reply is always to gesture at the democratic process, such as it is. And when this is met with the reply that the election’s outcome is moot, already a share of the protest’s energy has been spent. Some portion of the electorate will have been satisfied, and that’s quite often enough.

And yet inquiring further–much further–is exactly what a liberal democracy must do. Consider one reformist candidate who won an election in Iran last year: