Coercive Campaigning: Digital Surveillance and Electoral Autocracy in Venezuela

• In Event: Surveillance, Repression, and Technology in Autocratic Politics

Abstract

Most accounts of electoral authoritarianism downplay the role of the secret police, which are viewed as blunt tools whose primary job in the electoral arena is to wield violence on command. Yet the secret police may involve themselves in electoral authoritarian contestation in other ways and their surveillance capabilities may have far reaching implications for the dynamics of autocratic elections, particularly in an age when digital tools are greatly expanding such capabilities. This paper theorizes the involvement of secret police in electoral authoritarianism as double edged. On the one hand, surveillance often allows the regime to gain access to valuable secret information, which can be utilized to better chart strategy during elections and to manipulate the ranks of the opposition (selectively repressing or exiling certain politicians or key campaign staff, disrupting attempts at opposition unity) prior to elections. On the other hand, widespread surveillance leads citizens to become more likely to falsify and conceal their true preferences, such that public opinion polling becomes less accurate and regimes have more difficulty judging just how much they need to tilt the electoral playing field to secure electoral victories. Together, these double-edged dynamics produce mixed implications for the likelihood of autocratic regimes losing national elections but favor an overall increase in repression. The paper evaluates these claims in the case of contemporary Venezuela, drawing primarily upon a unique dataset of over 2000 documents obtained from the Venezuelan secret police and the results of an original survey experiment.

Author

• Samuel Handlin, Swarthmore College