Welcome to the Sounds of Democracy blog! The following blog post was written by Shalini Randeria, who is the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, as well as the Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the IHEID. Furthermore, she holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on Soft Authoritarianism. She is also the host of the Democracy in Question podcast series.