Last year, Dr. Brooklyn Walker (UT Knoxville) wrote a guest post for ALPS, presenting her new game/class exercise, titled “The World’s Best (Worst) Dictator” Game/Exercise. The learning objectives focused on students’ understanding of authoritarian systems, the durability of authoritarian leaders’ powers, and what an authoritarian playbook looks like.
Since I am teaching Comparative Politics for the first time in a long time this semester, I wanted to try Dr. Walker’s game and implement a fun exercise in my syllabus. Below I discuss and reflect how I adapted the game to a twenty-five person classroom, what worked, and what interesting moments the students experienced.
The set-up is simple:
1. The class watches Netflix’ “How to Become a Tyrant”, a six episode documentary, which outlines six authoritarian leaders’ rise to power, strategies to stay in power, and effects on domestic and global politics. Students take notes on all leaders’ strengths and weaknesses, but they focus specifically on one assigned leader who they will represent.
2. After watching the documentary, students (or in my case, student teams) spend an hour of class time collecting arguments and data (additional examples) to convince others as to why their authoritarian leader is the best of the worst. It requires a reshaping of a mindset, asking students to look at the authoritarian playbook laid out in the documentary and compare their leader’s behavior to it.
3. At the end, in the final class session, students envision all their six dictators in a slowly sinking hot air balloon. They need to discuss and argue, which leader is worse at being a dictator and thus deserves to be thrown out of the hot air balloon. In the end, a final dictator has “won” and is crowned the best (worst) dictator.
Reflections on my own experience:
1. The exercise hits a variety of student skills, including note taking, researching, team work, drafting of arguments, and participating in a group discussion.
2. Dr. Walker is absolutely right that this is a time intensive commitment. This is not the type of “small assignment” one can casually throw into course planning to change it up. My class watched the six episodes over the course of 3.5 50min class sessions. Then students researched for one 50min class session. The hot air balloon debate took place during another 50min session. In total, I spent two weeks of class time on it, including a class session that discussed broadly what authoritarian leadership is in the scholarship. In my broader class planning, I dedicated six weeks to regimes overall: two weeks on democracy, 2 weeks on democratic backsliding, and finally 2 weeks on authoritarianism. It is a lot, but I think in today’s political climate it was worth it.
3. Unlike Dr. Walker, who had each leader represented by one student (due to a small class size), I have twenty-five students in my class, which means that leaders were represented by student teams. Each group had one or two dominant students, who took charge of formulating arguments, attacking other leaders, and defending their own leader. In that, it is not clear when it comes to the preparation of the debate, who contributed in what capacity. Like Dr. Walker, I asked my students to submit a handout with notes, which I adapted from Dr. Walker’s class materials. That way, I was able to at least assess how much students were paying attention to the documentary on their own (without group input).
4. A caveat in assessment and preparation is when students miss individual class sessions. I don’t fault students for missing class when they communicate timely. In certain cases, students lost points on the handout when the notes were bare, or they had missed sessions without any notice.
5. During the hot air balloon debate, I had the entire class sit in a circle, with each team congregating in one area. I saw my role as the time keeper/note taker (for debrief). The students facilitated the discussion. For those of you, who are familiar with NBC’s The Traitor, – imagine my students accusing each other to be the traitor while Alan Cummings watches on in the old castle room. Same vibes. Although I was initially worried that dominating voices would drown out others, by my assessment every student contributed at one point or another. The students really got into it, developing ever more outlandish arguments.
6. I organized the discussion into three rounds with nine minutes each, and after each round we voted two leaders out of the balloon (last round, only one leader). What I had not anticipated was that individual groups started forming alliances in their voting and in their arguments, sticking together until it was time to break up the alliances. I think you should consider that as you think about implementation in your own classes. I don’t know yet how to counter this, as it seemed to evolve organically throughout the discussion. Not sure if it is even a problem? In order to keep student participation up, I allowed “expelled” students to still participate in the discussion and add to the conversation.
7. I don’t know what I was expecting in terms of their arguments or how they would assess their leaders’ strengths, but my students zeroed in quite early on 1) how the leader came to power (“self-made”, appointed, supported by international powers, etc.) and 2) how the leader’s tenure was ended (capture, death, “retirement”, etc.), judging each other’s strengths in relation to these variables, which says a lot about legacy formation and how they conceptualized power and grasping of the playbook. I thought that was a neat notion they explored.
8. Make sure they understand that this is not an exercise aiming to glorify authoritarian leaders, ala “look how cool they are”. This is about authoritarian power, power grabs, and durability of these systems.
Thank you to Dr. Walker for her exercise design. I had a blast adapting it for my students and class size. I am curious if others have tried this game or others we have here on our site.
How about a hot air balloon filled with the worst US presidents?