Good morning or good afternoon, everyone.
I would like to start with you, Dr. Lindberg. You've written extensively on autocratization. If we start from Dahl's famous conceptualization that electoral democracy is a polyarchy, and if we go now and see the democratic erosion going on throughout Europe, probably one of the most interesting things is that this autocratization is affecting democratic countries as opposed to the electoral autocracies that it affected in the past. When we look at the majority of the countries that are being affected, a lot have to be east European countries, the near abroad states to Russia.
How much is this democratic erosion phenomenon a general phenomenon and how much is it simply the near abroad countries—Hungary, Poland, the Visegrad nations—that are being affected, maybe because they have a Russian-speaking population because they're in close proximity to Russia? How much is it a Russian orbital problem, or how much is this democratic erosion a more widespread problem?