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Welcome to The Spectator Podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. In this week's episode, we'll discuss how elections across the world have been taken advantage of to give more power to corrupt leaders.

We also talk about the international persecution of Muslims and ask, why don't young Corbynites care about anti-Semitism?

First, while the world has been reeling from news of Cambridge Analytica's political interference,

two academics have been following the trail of shady election rigging across the world that go far deeper than social media.

Professor Nick Cheesman at the University of Birmingham and Dr Brian Klass at the LSE have visited developing democracies from Asia to Africa to Europe.

In this week's cover piece, they explain the extent of election rigging in

these countries and what we in mature democracies can do about it. So Nick, who is rigging

elections and how are they doing it? Well, a surprising number of people are rigging elections.

One of the things that we find is that actually in many parts of the world now more elections

are being rigged than actually could be said to be free and fair.

And there's a number of different categories that we identify. I mean, some are people who really hold, you know, almost wholly authoritarian elections.

So these are elections in which the context involves human rights abuses, you know, high uses of violence, all the kind of tactics

you might imagine. But there's also a set of people who are doing a much better job of pretending

to be Democrats, but nonetheless consistently making sure that they returned at the ballot box.

And we refer to them as counterfeit Democrats. So both dictators and counterfeit

Democrats are able to rig elections and to get away with it. Brian, this sounds a lot more

serious than the row we've been having about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Yeah, so I think

the British public is waking up to the fact that these manipulations are commonplace

in the rest of the world,

and it's an ugly wake-up call that they're happening here too.

All the elections that we observe or that we have studied,

...