Transparency for Stability: A Longer Path to Accountability

• In Event: Authoritarian Governance in the Post-Soviet Space: Responsiveness, Control, and Institutional Legacies

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes tend to hide information about their rule from their own citizens and other states. Scholarship has uncovered different techniques of information distortion, censorship, and media control. At the same time, some autocracies disclose information about the work of their governments, the income of bureaucrats and politicians, procurement contracts, and more. Given their usual preference for secrecy, why are these disclosures happening – and what are their effects? In the work I argue that transparency in autocracies is used as a tool of control. Autocrats need to rely on the state and bureaucrats to carry out policies, public good provision, control over the society. Because of non-competitive elections the standard mechanism of accountability of bureaucrats and politicians to the civil society does not work. It leads to various issues known as principal-agent problem (loyalty-competence tradeoff). Analyzing the adoption of the Freedom of Information law in Russia and its enforcement I show that transparency might be one of the tools to ensure compliance of local officials (agents) to the principal (autocrat). Consequently, digitalization in general and transparency in particular might lead to more control from the autocrat.