Surveillance, Repression, and Technology in Autocratic Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Surveillance and repression are fundamental strategies through which autocracies maintain control over society. In recent years, digital technologies have given states powerful new tools for conducting these activities, leading to an emerging line of research examining this new “digital authoritarianism” in broad strokes. Yet this burgeoning set of research still leaves many questions unresolved about the implications of digital tools for autocratic politics and about how the new dynamics of surveillance and repression differ from those in past dictatorships. This panel seeks to both examine the contemporary politics of digital surveillance under autocratic rule and to put the connections between surveillance, repression, and technology under autocratic rule in comparative and historical perspective.

Two papers directly study the politics of digital surveillance in contemporary autocracies. Xu considers the relationship between state surveillance and the degree of violent repression in China, arguing that the country’s fearsome digital surveillance state has created an “upward spiral” allowing social control with relatively minimal levels of violence. Handlin examines how digitally empowered secret police have shaped the dynamics of electoral authoritarianism in Venezuela, arguing that extensive surveillance has been double-edged: Heavy surveillance has given the regime unique insight into the strategies and internal dynamics of the opposition, but has also increased the tendency of the population to conceal their political preferences, making elections more unpredictable and dangerous to the regime. Two other papers provide comparative and historical perspectives on surveillance, repression, and technology. Esberg studies the use of artistic blacklisting by autocracies to manage the social impact of the film industry in the pre-digital age, examining Argentine’s dictatorship during the 1970s and the long-run effects of this form of repression. Thomson examines the fundamental issue of how dictatorships can both create secret policing institutions with great capacity for surveillance and repression while also preventing those institutions from turning those capabilities on regime leaders themselves, studying the nature and evolution of secret police in six dictatorships of East-Central Europe in the Cold War era.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Coercive Campaigning: Digital Surveillance and Electoral Autocracy in Venezuela - Samuel Handlin, Swarthmore College

• The Effects of Career Blacklisting: Evidence from the Film Industry in Argentina - Jane Esberg, University of Pennsylvania

• Automated Repression: Bias in AI-Assisted Criminal Sentencing in China - Eddie Yang, University of California, San Diego

• Watching the Watchers: Elite Cohesion, Coercive Capacity and Social Order - Henry Thomson, Arizona State University

Chair

• Dan Slater University of Michigan

Discussant

• Alexandra Arons Siegel University of Coloardo Boulder