Saqer AlKhalifa

Dr. Saqer AlKhalifa served in Bahrain's diplomatic service, including a posting in Washington through the Arab Spring. He teaches comparative political ideologies at the American University of Bahrain and advises the Ministry of Education. He holds a doctorate from Claremont Graduate University.

Shackles of Democracy is his second book. It argues that the decline of democracy is measurable, that it is driven from within rather than imposed from outside, and that competitive pressure will push democratic governments toward managing what their publics believe. The argument rests on 22 original statistical models built from Freedom House, V-Dem and World Bank data. Every dataset and model is published so that readers can check the work themselves.

His first book, The Trust Trap, examined why institutions lose the confidence of the people inside them.