Internal Information and Theory Generation in the Study of Autocracies

• In Event: New Concepts, New Classifications and New Data in China, Russia and Beyond

Abstract

Opacity is a fundamental hurdle that confronts students of autocracies. Although some aspects of authoritarian politics can be observed with relative ease, many others are either invisible or can only be evaluated indirectly. One acutely important question that is especially difficult to study is the strategies that autocrats use to assess popular discontent. The classic literature has posited that this problem is insurmountable (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965; Kuran 1991; Lohmann 1994; Wintrobe 1998). More recent research on authoritarianism has identified competitive elections (Magaloni 2006; Brownlee 2007; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009; Blaydes 2011), unconstrained protests (Lorentzen 2013) and liberalized media (Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin 2009; Stockmann 2013; Lorentzen 2014; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013, 2017) as channels that reveal levels of popular discontent.
This paper argues that elections, protests, and free media are undesirable from the autocrat’s point of view because they provide publicly observable indicia of discontent that can increase the likelihood of anti-regime collective action. Channels that allow for the private transmission of internal information on popular discontent have considerably greater utility from the perspective of regime insiders. The existence of these private channels for internal information transmission raises the question of why autocrats hold competitive elections, tolerate some protests, and occasionally permit critical reporting. The paper argues that these publicly observable spectacles are deployed as carefully managed tools for promoting resilience by demonstrating responsiveness to popular opinion, rather than as mechanisms for collecting information on levels of popular discontent.
The central methodological concern that motivates this paper is the strategies for generating theories about nontransparent phenomena in autocracies. Aspects of authoritarian politics, such as the techniques used to monitor public discontent, are hidden by design, thus raising practical challenges regarding the collection of empirical data that are necessary to develop theories of authoritarian rule. Because the monitoring of popular discontent is not officially acknowledged to exist, it cannot be studied on the basis of publicly available materials. The paper argues that internal government documents, which were prepared for regime insiders and were not meant for public dissemination, are useful for revealing internal regime understandings of the problem of assessing and responding to popular discontent. Such materials were largely unavailable when the classic theories of authoritarian rule were developed but have recently become accessible for a range of authoritarian regimes. This paper argues that these materials can produce new empirical insights about the internal logic of authoritarian rule. Such materials allow us to generate theories that provide a different explanation for the functions of elections, protests, and the media from theories developed on the basis of publicly observable indicia of discontent.
The paper is based on a large corpus of Soviet, Bulgarian, East German, and Chinese internal government documents, which were collected by the author in various archival repositories in Russia, Bulgaria, Germany, China, Hong Kong, and the United States. These documents are supplemented with a dataset of 65,000 protests from China; a dataset constructed from publicly available newspaper materials on popular discontent in Cuba; and government documents on the handling of citizen complaints in contemporary Russia. In addition, the paper also makes use of 80 interviews conducted in China, Bulgaria, Germany, and Cuba.

Author

• Martin Dimitrov, Tulane University