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Information Politics in Dictatorships

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Information Politics in Dictatorships

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Information Politics in Dictatorships
JEREMY L. WALLACE

Abstract
Political science has made great progress in the study of nondemocratic regime
survival in the past 15 years. Democratization is only one threat that such regimes
face—indeed, most nondemocratic regimes are replaced by other dictators. How do
regimes learn about the threats facing them? Cutting-edge research has pointed to
elite institutions, such as legislatures and politburos, easing information problems
among regime insiders. However, the ways that nondemocratic regimes gather
information about local agent performance and society remain underexplored.

INTRODUCTION
The ousting of long-time dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 undermined
conventional understandings of the longevity and durability of nondemocratic regimes. Tunisia’s Ben Ali was pressed out of office following protests
in the streets of Tunis, the capital. A lack of jobs and increasing food prices
were the some of the timber upon which an isolated incident exploded
into a conflagration that brought down the regime. The spark was the
self-immolation of a young unemployed university graduate in Sidi Bouzid,
a small city in the interior of the country, after local officials and police
punished him for selling vegetables on the street without a permit.1 This
sacrificial act ignited demonstrations in that city that were violently put
down by regime’s security officers. Ben Ali replaced the regional governor
and promised massive spending to employ university graduates.2 Despite
these concessions, the protests became more deadly, and by 12 January they
spread to Tunis. Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia on 14 January.3
The Jasmine Revolution had begun.4
1. Q&A: Tunisia Crisis (2011).
2. Voice of America (2011).
3. Al Jazeera (2011).
4. The name “Jasmine Revolution” comes in the tradition of naming revolutions for colors and
flowers—Carnation Revolution (Portugal 1974), Rose Revolution (Georgia 2003), Orange Revolution
(Ukraine 2004), Tulip Revolution (Kyrgryzstan 2005), Green Revolution (Iran 2009), and so on—with the
Jasmine flower having some political resonance in Tunisia (Frangeul, 2011).
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The downfall of Egypt’s Mubarak regime followed quickly thereafter.
Massive demonstrations on 25 January 2011 took over numerous politically significant locales, most prominently Tahrir Square in central Cairo.
Inspired by the Tunisians’ success, citizens—frustrated with high levels of
unemployment, unfair elections, crumbling infrastructure, corruption, state
violence, an aging dictator angling to replace himself with his son Gamal,
and more—marched en masse and took over the central square.5 The army
refused to open fire on the crowds, which remained in Tahrir until Mubarak
stepped down on 11 February.6
On the other hand, the situation in Beijing and other Chinese cities could not
have been more different. No massive protests expressed outrage at the rule
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing or in any other of China’s
major metropolises. While activists did attempt to use the Arab uprisings to
call attention to problems of governance and freedom, the Chinese regime
quickly detained them, put into place Internet controls that reduced the ability of “netizens” to organize and communicate, and curtailed the activities
of reporters.7 What differentiated China from Tunisia or Egypt? Why has the
CCP regime endured while other seemingly durable regimes collapsed?
More broadly, how do dictators learn about the threats that they face?
In analyzing the politics of dictatorships, political science has traditionally
focused on the topic of democratization—that is, the end of dictatorship. But
most dictators and nondemocratic regimes are replaced not in transitions
to democracy but by other nondemocratic regimes.8 Thus, the existential
threats to a dictator are not just those of mass uprisings leading to democratization but also elite takeovers, splits, and coups. Scholars have pointed
to a number of different factors as significantly affecting the probability of
regime collapse: the identity of the leader, the presence of a legislature, the
extent of personalization of politics, the rate of economic growth, and the
political geography of the country.9 However, research into the mechanisms
that dictators themselves use to learn about the threats that they face—and
how these mechanisms shape the societies that they rule over—is only
emerging.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Nondemocratic regime survival is not equivalent to the survival of nondemocracy as the ruling technology in a territory. A king killed in a palace
5. Lynch (2012), Masoud (2011).
6. Lynch (2012, p. 92).
7. Dickson (2011).
8. Geddes (1999b), Hadenius and Teorell (2007).
9. Among others, see Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2010), Gandhi (2008), Geddes (1999b), Magaloni (2006), Pepinsky (2009a), Wallace (2013), and Wright (2008).

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putsch by an ambitious colonel does not contemplate the regime type of
the government after his assassination. For the dead king, the continuation
of nondemocratic rule in the country provides no measure of success or
comfort.10 Take the CCP’s Red Army triumph over the Nationalists in 1949,
forcing the latter to flee to Taiwan. This “liberation” did not reflect a change
in China’s regime type, but it certainly was a change in regime, as Chiang
Kai-shek and his exiled compatriots would have told you. Regimes care
greatly about the possibility of regime change and make efforts to head
off threats to their continued rule. Yet, until recently, the dominant focus
in political science has not been regimes and their survival but changes in
regime type.11 Continuous measures of regime type, such as the ones created
by Polity and Freedom House, are ubiquitous and numerically dominate
the quantitative study of social science, but changes in these “democracy”
scores often fail to reflect regime changes.12
The study of nondemocratic regime survival has become a growth industry
in the social sciences. Competing typologies of nondemocratic regimes are
said to account for variation in the duration of these regimes.13 Nondemocratic regime types are associated not only with different durations but also
different foreign policy behavior, patterns of economic growth, likelihood of
democratization, and the fates of leaders after they leave office.14 Military
regimes are particularly short-lived, while single or dominant party regimes
endure.15 Others have pointed to higher levels of institutionalization, such as
the presence of elections or legislatures, as abetting authoritarian rule.16 Still
others examine structural threats facing dictators and their responses to these
threats.17 This burgeoning literature has shed light on what was obscured by
the focus on democratization.
Regimes are constantly attempting to strengthen their grip on power.
They focus on building or maintaining repressive capacity, implementing
legitimation strategies, and holding together political institutions and
coalitions.18 The most studied nondemocratic regime presently is China’s
long-lived CCP-led regime.
10. Post-tenure fate is something that leaders do consider when making decisions, however Debs and
Goemans (2010).
11. Oddly, one of the few times in comparative politics where the interaction of the masses has led the
social science literature over the interactions of the elites.
12. Dahl (1971). Cheibub et al. (2010) on different measures of democracy. For a more expansive treatment, see Munck and Verkuilen (2002).
13. For example, Geddes (1999a) and Hadenius and Teorell (2007).
14. Debs and Goemans (2010), Gandhi (2008), Weeks (2008), and Wright (2008). See also Debs (n.d.).
15. Geddes (1999b), Hadenius and Teorell (2007), Magaloni (2006).
16. Blaydes (2010) and Lust-Okar (2005, 2006).
17. Wallace (2013).
18. See Levitsky and Way (2010) and Policzer (2009) on repressive capacity; Blaydes (2010) and Gandhi
(2008) on political institutions; and Magaloni (2006) and Pepinsky (2009b) on political coalitions.

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Much contemporary analysis of China’s political system revolves around
the ideas that authority is fragmented and the center’s insight into localities
is limited. While the top leadership are in Beijing, local officials or society are
not under the total control of the center. Indeed, local discretion is something
of a defining characteristic of the Chinese regime after Mao Zedong’s death
and is often seen as a “double-edged sword”: given credit for inculcating policy innovations and economic development, while at the same time leading
to poor governance and corruption.19
Local competition between officials is viewed as one channel accounting for
China’s impressive economic growth during the reform era.20 Promotions are
valued by local officials who are, in part, judged on macroeconomic performance data.21 Such competition constrains local governments from predatory behavior; businesses benefit from this competition to attract investment
and improve the climate for economic activity. Many argue that the ruthless
competition for promotion translates into good economic policymaking and
efficient, or at least business-friendly, governance.
On the other hand, local government discretion has some demonstrable
negative consequences. Local governments have relatively free hands in
dealing with economies under their rule, yielding pervasive corruption.
Competition between localities has also led to internal trade barriers as officials act to protect local businesses from competition from “external” actors.
Trucks carrying goods across county borders can be charged extortionate
tariffs or prevented from entering the rival county to sell their goods, no
matter the price.22 Such protectionism is considered inefficient at the level
of nation-states; when the actors in question are Chinese counties, with
populations on average in the single-digit millions, the amount of waste
is a substantial share of total economic production in the county. Negative
consequences of local discretion can move to the point of defiance, where
specific targets put forward by the center are ignored by local officials.23
Local discretion is fundamentally an information problem. The center is
unable to observe its agents at the local level and to be aware of the multitude
and variety of issues with which they deal on a daily basis. New social scientific research on dictatorships is turning to such information problems as critical to improve our understanding of regimes and the threats that they face.

19. Mei and Pearson (2014).
20. Oi (1999) and Weingast, Qian, and Montinola (1995).
21. This literature is sometimes described as the “tournament model” of promotion and has been used
to justify descriptions of the CCP-led regime as a meritocracy (e.g., Li, 2012; Su, Tao, Xi, & Li, 2012).
22. Wedeman (2003).
23. Mei and Pearson (2014).

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CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
The political place of information in nondemocratic contexts is critical. In
democracies, threats and opportunities for politicians arise from elections,
which represent the aggregation of individual preferences among the
politician in a controlled setting. Politicians in nondemocracies, on the other
hand, face a more open-ended and irregular opportunity-threat space.24
Svolik (2012) condenses the threats that dictators face into two types—those
from the masses (“the problem of authoritarian control”) and those from
other elites inside the ruling coalition (“the problem of authoritarian power
sharing”).25
The principal method that dictators use to address problems with elites is
the creation of institutions, such as politburos and legislatures, to regularize communication and make public information among the elite.26 Scholars
have linked these legislatures to both political survival and economic growth,
with the mechanism causing these outcomes to be that they act as arenas of
information collection and exchange as well as tying the dictator’s hands.27
While the mechanisms proposed are plausible, research is just beginning to
delve into the actual operation of authoritarian legislatures and other elite
institutions.28
However, information problems exist not only among the elite but also over
threats that may emanate from society as well as the monitoring of local
agents. Threatening acts, such as small-scale protests, can be harnessed as
fire alarms alerting the center to local malfeasance, as occurs in China.29 More
direct mechanisms are also used in dictatorships, as shown in work by Dimitrov.30 Reconsidering the conventional wisdom that the Eastern European
Communist regimes were surprised by the mass resistance of 1989, Dimitrov shows that those regimes had detailed information on their populations
related to both overt and covert discontent. Regimes conducted regular surveys and maintained institutions for complaints alongside more traditional
surveillance activities through state security forces, internal media reports,
and the Communist Party itself.31 While regimes had an interest in avoiding
the public dissemination of information about the levels of discontent, they
had every reason to collect information on it for their own internal use.32
24. While many nondemocracies have elections, they are not as pivotal as in democratic settings.
25. Svolik (2012).
26. Svolik (2012).
27. Boix (2003), Gandhi and Przeworski (2006), and Wright (2008). Also Blaydes (2010), Boix and
Svolik (2013), Gandhi (2008), Magaloni (2006), and Svolik (2012).
28. Exceptions include Malesky and Schuler (2011), Malesky and Schuler (2010), and Truex (2014).
29. Lorentzen (2013), and O’Brien and Li (2006).
30. For example, Dimitrov (2014).
31. Dimitrov (2014, pp. 10–13).
32. Dimitrov (2014). Security, intelligence, and police forces in nondemocratic regimes are increasingly
being investigated, e.g., Policzer (2009) and Schoenhals (2013). On the dangers of public dissemination of
information in nondemocracies, see Hollyer, Rosendorff, and Vreeland (2011) and below.

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FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Regimes interested in their own survival are not solely concerned about contemporaneous levels of discontent, but the socioeconomic and governance
situations facing their citizens shape the development of future threats to the
regime and are thus targets for information collection. However, two difficulties that are important subjects for future work on the information politics of
dictatorships arise. First, how do the elites’ data-collecting enterprises shape
the incentives and actions of local agents as well as society’s under their rule?
Second, is the information collected and released by nondemocratic regimes
likely to be subject to manipulation for political reasons?
Investigation into these questions is most developed in the case of
China’s regime. The work on the double-edged nature of local discretion
in China is based on the idea that local governments are judged by a series
of quantitative metrics. The center, then, attempts to create a system of
information collection that focuses on what needs to be observed and how.
The regime’s emphasis has been to collect quantitative metrics of economic
performance, population growth, social stability, and, increasingly, the
environment. These metrics shape the behavior of local actors in ways
both beneficial—promoting economic growth—and detrimental—wasted
resources and corruption—to the central regime’s interests.
The second future direction for work on information politics in dictatorships is on the possibility and reality of data manipulation. Work by Xiao
and Womack as well as Wallace has begun to explore this topic.33 As Xiao
and Womack write:
Behind the problems of credibility of public official information in China lie
two patterns of internal information distortion, one restricting the downward
flow of sensitive general information and the other filtering the upward flow of
local information. Information gathered at the center is increasingly restricted
as it is transmitted down the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the ‘facts on the ground’
are sifted by local official interests at each level of upward transmittal.34

Xiao and Womack establish with survey data of local officials in China that
there exists real concern that the official statistics reflect the reality “on the
ground.”
The problem can go beyond filtering. Local officials operating, as they do
in China, on a system that rewards local officials based on quantified performance metrics might have incentives to manipulate those performance
statistics. As Wallace writes:
33. Wallace (2014) and Xiao and Womack (2014).
34. Xiao and Womack (2014).

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Since citizens value economic development, hierarchical regimes interested in
monitoring lower level officials without undue auditing expenses can use economic statistics as information shortcuts. Lower-level officials, knowing the
statistics by which they are judged and having some control over the bureaucrats who create those statistics, have an incentive to juke [i.e. manipulate] the
stats. A center that judges sub-national officials using performance-based targets is often reliant on these same sub-national officials to supply them with
those performance estimates. This principal-agent problem bedevils a dictator
interested in creating an accountability mechanism for subordinates based on
economic data. Sub-national leaders may be rewarded on the basis of manipulated data since monitoring costs make it expensive to night impossible for
central authorities to know the real situation on the ground with certainty.

Such data manipulation at the local level can undermine the reputation of
the regime as a whole. On the other hand, such manipulations hold the potential to be useful at the national level as well.
Economic downturns are dangerous for dictators. In part, this danger arises
because the number of individuals holding grievances against the regime
increases. In addition, when such poor performance is officially acknowledged, the public as a whole is aware of the bad times and as such may be
more able to coordinate collective action against the regime.35 However, if a
regime can successfully manipulate the public release of economic statistics,
it can muddy these waters. Some may stop seeing themselves as among a
large cohort negatively disposed to the regime. Individuals may well think
that they are, if not precisely, alone in their bad circumstances, then perhaps
part of a smaller slice of the population that has drawn the short end of
the stick in times of general plenty. Individuals who do not believe that the
citizenry is aggrieved enough to participate in or at least tacitly support revolutionary action are less likely to move forward with such seditious acts.
Such changes in general beliefs may be enough for a regime to avoid danger
in a precarious moment, one with revolutionary or coup potential.36
Dictators will never be able to know all of the threats that they face with
perfect certainty. The possibility that the sacrifice of a single individual in
response to the misbehavior of local agents might destroy the long-lived
regime of Ben Ali in Tunisia seemed beyond remote before its occurrence
in 2011. However, the ways in which dictators attempt to investigate the
threats that they do face, both from democratization and from other potential
nondemocratic regimes, remain fertile ground for social science research.
In the end, it is clear that the fall of the Eastern European Communist
regimes in 1989 did not mark the end of history; capitalist democracy
remains ascendant, but it is far from universal. As such, it is incumbent on
35. Hollyer et al. (2011).
36. On revolutionary moments, see, for instance, Acemoglu and Robinson (2005).

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researchers to explore the politics of nondemocratic regimes. These politics
are the politics of dangers, collecting information about those dangers, and
the ways in which that information gathering can shape the contours of
governance.
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JEREMY L. WALLACE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jeremy L. Wallace is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Ohio
State University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2009.
His research examines the politics of nondemocratic societies, particularly
contemporary China. Using cross-national and Chinese data, his first
book—Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in
China—details the threats that cities pose for authoritarian regimes, regime
responses to those threats such as China’s management of urbanization, and
how those responses can backfire by exacerbating the growth of slums and
cities. His research has been published in the Journal of Politics, British Journal
of Political Science, and Global Environmental Change, among others.
RELATED ESSAYS
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Information Politics in Dictatorships

11

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Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Delusions (Psychology), Max Coltheart
Trust and Economic Organization (Sociology), Karen S. Cook and Bogdan
State
Misinformation and How to Correct It (Psychology), John Cook et al.
Ambivalence and Inbetweeness (Sociology), Bernhard Giesen
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
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Moore and Ryan M. Welch
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Popular Protest, Nationalism, and Domestic-International Linkages in
Chinese Politics (Political Science), Jessica Chen Weiss



Information Politics in Dictatorships
JEREMY L. WALLACE

Abstract
Political science has made great progress in the study of nondemocratic regime
survival in the past 15 years. Democratization is only one threat that such regimes
face—indeed, most nondemocratic regimes are replaced by other dictators. How do
regimes learn about the threats facing them? Cutting-edge research has pointed to
elite institutions, such as legislatures and politburos, easing information problems
among regime insiders. However, the ways that nondemocratic regimes gather
information about local agent performance and society remain underexplored.

INTRODUCTION
The ousting of long-time dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 undermined
conventional understandings of the longevity and durability of nondemocratic regimes. Tunisia’s Ben Ali was pressed out of office following protests
in the streets of Tunis, the capital. A lack of jobs and increasing food prices
were the some of the timber upon which an isolated incident exploded
into a conflagration that brought down the regime. The spark was the
self-immolation of a young unemployed university graduate in Sidi Bouzid,
a small city in the interior of the country, after local officials and police
punished him for selling vegetables on the street without a permit.1 This
sacrificial act ignited demonstrations in that city that were violently put
down by regime’s security officers. Ben Ali replaced the regional governor
and promised massive spending to employ university graduates.2 Despite
these concessions, the protests became more deadly, and by 12 January they
spread to Tunis. Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia on 14 January.3
The Jasmine Revolution had begun.4
1. Q&A: Tunisia Crisis (2011).
2. Voice of America (2011).
3. Al Jazeera (2011).
4. The name “Jasmine Revolution” comes in the tradition of naming revolutions for colors and
flowers—Carnation Revolution (Portugal 1974), Rose Revolution (Georgia 2003), Orange Revolution
(Ukraine 2004), Tulip Revolution (Kyrgryzstan 2005), Green Revolution (Iran 2009), and so on—with the
Jasmine flower having some political resonance in Tunisia (Frangeul, 2011).
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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The downfall of Egypt’s Mubarak regime followed quickly thereafter.
Massive demonstrations on 25 January 2011 took over numerous politically significant locales, most prominently Tahrir Square in central Cairo.
Inspired by the Tunisians’ success, citizens—frustrated with high levels of
unemployment, unfair elections, crumbling infrastructure, corruption, state
violence, an aging dictator angling to replace himself with his son Gamal,
and more—marched en masse and took over the central square.5 The army
refused to open fire on the crowds, which remained in Tahrir until Mubarak
stepped down on 11 February.6
On the other hand, the situation in Beijing and other Chinese cities could not
have been more different. No massive protests expressed outrage at the rule
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing or in any other of China’s
major metropolises. While activists did attempt to use the Arab uprisings to
call attention to problems of governance and freedom, the Chinese regime
quickly detained them, put into place Internet controls that reduced the ability of “netizens” to organize and communicate, and curtailed the activities
of reporters.7 What differentiated China from Tunisia or Egypt? Why has the
CCP regime endured while other seemingly durable regimes collapsed?
More broadly, how do dictators learn about the threats that they face?
In analyzing the politics of dictatorships, political science has traditionally
focused on the topic of democratization—that is, the end of dictatorship. But
most dictators and nondemocratic regimes are replaced not in transitions
to democracy but by other nondemocratic regimes.8 Thus, the existential
threats to a dictator are not just those of mass uprisings leading to democratization but also elite takeovers, splits, and coups. Scholars have pointed
to a number of different factors as significantly affecting the probability of
regime collapse: the identity of the leader, the presence of a legislature, the
extent of personalization of politics, the rate of economic growth, and the
political geography of the country.9 However, research into the mechanisms
that dictators themselves use to learn about the threats that they face—and
how these mechanisms shape the societies that they rule over—is only
emerging.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Nondemocratic regime survival is not equivalent to the survival of nondemocracy as the ruling technology in a territory. A king killed in a palace
5. Lynch (2012), Masoud (2011).
6. Lynch (2012, p. 92).
7. Dickson (2011).
8. Geddes (1999b), Hadenius and Teorell (2007).
9. Among others, see Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2010), Gandhi (2008), Geddes (1999b), Magaloni (2006), Pepinsky (2009a), Wallace (2013), and Wright (2008).

Information Politics in Dictatorships

3

putsch by an ambitious colonel does not contemplate the regime type of
the government after his assassination. For the dead king, the continuation
of nondemocratic rule in the country provides no measure of success or
comfort.10 Take the CCP’s Red Army triumph over the Nationalists in 1949,
forcing the latter to flee to Taiwan. This “liberation” did not reflect a change
in China’s regime type, but it certainly was a change in regime, as Chiang
Kai-shek and his exiled compatriots would have told you. Regimes care
greatly about the possibility of regime change and make efforts to head
off threats to their continued rule. Yet, until recently, the dominant focus
in political science has not been regimes and their survival but changes in
regime type.11 Continuous measures of regime type, such as the ones created
by Polity and Freedom House, are ubiquitous and numerically dominate
the quantitative study of social science, but changes in these “democracy”
scores often fail to reflect regime changes.12
The study of nondemocratic regime survival has become a growth industry
in the social sciences. Competing typologies of nondemocratic regimes are
said to account for variation in the duration of these regimes.13 Nondemocratic regime types are associated not only with different durations but also
different foreign policy behavior, patterns of economic growth, likelihood of
democratization, and the fates of leaders after they leave office.14 Military
regimes are particularly short-lived, while single or dominant party regimes
endure.15 Others have pointed to higher levels of institutionalization, such as
the presence of elections or legislatures, as abetting authoritarian rule.16 Still
others examine structural threats facing dictators and their responses to these
threats.17 This burgeoning literature has shed light on what was obscured by
the focus on democratization.
Regimes are constantly attempting to strengthen their grip on power.
They focus on building or maintaining repressive capacity, implementing
legitimation strategies, and holding together political institutions and
coalitions.18 The most studied nondemocratic regime presently is China’s
long-lived CCP-led regime.
10. Post-tenure fate is something that leaders do consider when making decisions, however Debs and
Goemans (2010).
11. Oddly, one of the few times in comparative politics where the interaction of the masses has led the
social science literature over the interactions of the elites.
12. Dahl (1971). Cheibub et al. (2010) on different measures of democracy. For a more expansive treatment, see Munck and Verkuilen (2002).
13. For example, Geddes (1999a) and Hadenius and Teorell (2007).
14. Debs and Goemans (2010), Gandhi (2008), Weeks (2008), and Wright (2008). See also Debs (n.d.).
15. Geddes (1999b), Hadenius and Teorell (2007), Magaloni (2006).
16. Blaydes (2010) and Lust-Okar (2005, 2006).
17. Wallace (2013).
18. See Levitsky and Way (2010) and Policzer (2009) on repressive capacity; Blaydes (2010) and Gandhi
(2008) on political institutions; and Magaloni (2006) and Pepinsky (2009b) on political coalitions.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Much contemporary analysis of China’s political system revolves around
the ideas that authority is fragmented and the center’s insight into localities
is limited. While the top leadership are in Beijing, local officials or society are
not under the total control of the center. Indeed, local discretion is something
of a defining characteristic of the Chinese regime after Mao Zedong’s death
and is often seen as a “double-edged sword”: given credit for inculcating policy innovations and economic development, while at the same time leading
to poor governance and corruption.19
Local competition between officials is viewed as one channel accounting for
China’s impressive economic growth during the reform era.20 Promotions are
valued by local officials who are, in part, judged on macroeconomic performance data.21 Such competition constrains local governments from predatory behavior; businesses benefit from this competition to attract investment
and improve the climate for economic activity. Many argue that the ruthless
competition for promotion translates into good economic policymaking and
efficient, or at least business-friendly, governance.
On the other hand, local government discretion has some demonstrable
negative consequences. Local governments have relatively free hands in
dealing with economies under their rule, yielding pervasive corruption.
Competition between localities has also led to internal trade barriers as officials act to protect local businesses from competition from “external” actors.
Trucks carrying goods across county borders can be charged extortionate
tariffs or prevented from entering the rival county to sell their goods, no
matter the price.22 Such protectionism is considered inefficient at the level
of nation-states; when the actors in question are Chinese counties, with
populations on average in the single-digit millions, the amount of waste
is a substantial share of total economic production in the county. Negative
consequences of local discretion can move to the point of defiance, where
specific targets put forward by the center are ignored by local officials.23
Local discretion is fundamentally an information problem. The center is
unable to observe its agents at the local level and to be aware of the multitude
and variety of issues with which they deal on a daily basis. New social scientific research on dictatorships is turning to such information problems as critical to improve our understanding of regimes and the threats that they face.

19. Mei and Pearson (2014).
20. Oi (1999) and Weingast, Qian, and Montinola (1995).
21. This literature is sometimes described as the “tournament model” of promotion and has been used
to justify descriptions of the CCP-led regime as a meritocracy (e.g., Li, 2012; Su, Tao, Xi, & Li, 2012).
22. Wedeman (2003).
23. Mei and Pearson (2014).

Information Politics in Dictatorships

5

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
The political place of information in nondemocratic contexts is critical. In
democracies, threats and opportunities for politicians arise from elections,
which represent the aggregation of individual preferences among the
politician in a controlled setting. Politicians in nondemocracies, on the other
hand, face a more open-ended and irregular opportunity-threat space.24
Svolik (2012) condenses the threats that dictators face into two types—those
from the masses (“the problem of authoritarian control”) and those from
other elites inside the ruling coalition (“the problem of authoritarian power
sharing”).25
The principal method that dictators use to address problems with elites is
the creation of institutions, such as politburos and legislatures, to regularize communication and make public information among the elite.26 Scholars
have linked these legislatures to both political survival and economic growth,
with the mechanism causing these outcomes to be that they act as arenas of
information collection and exchange as well as tying the dictator’s hands.27
While the mechanisms proposed are plausible, research is just beginning to
delve into the actual operation of authoritarian legislatures and other elite
institutions.28
However, information problems exist not only among the elite but also over
threats that may emanate from society as well as the monitoring of local
agents. Threatening acts, such as small-scale protests, can be harnessed as
fire alarms alerting the center to local malfeasance, as occurs in China.29 More
direct mechanisms are also used in dictatorships, as shown in work by Dimitrov.30 Reconsidering the conventional wisdom that the Eastern European
Communist regimes were surprised by the mass resistance of 1989, Dimitrov shows that those regimes had detailed information on their populations
related to both overt and covert discontent. Regimes conducted regular surveys and maintained institutions for complaints alongside more traditional
surveillance activities through state security forces, internal media reports,
and the Communist Party itself.31 While regimes had an interest in avoiding
the public dissemination of information about the levels of discontent, they
had every reason to collect information on it for their own internal use.32
24. While many nondemocracies have elections, they are not as pivotal as in democratic settings.
25. Svolik (2012).
26. Svolik (2012).
27. Boix (2003), Gandhi and Przeworski (2006), and Wright (2008). Also Blaydes (2010), Boix and
Svolik (2013), Gandhi (2008), Magaloni (2006), and Svolik (2012).
28. Exceptions include Malesky and Schuler (2011), Malesky and Schuler (2010), and Truex (2014).
29. Lorentzen (2013), and O’Brien and Li (2006).
30. For example, Dimitrov (2014).
31. Dimitrov (2014, pp. 10–13).
32. Dimitrov (2014). Security, intelligence, and police forces in nondemocratic regimes are increasingly
being investigated, e.g., Policzer (2009) and Schoenhals (2013). On the dangers of public dissemination of
information in nondemocracies, see Hollyer, Rosendorff, and Vreeland (2011) and below.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Regimes interested in their own survival are not solely concerned about contemporaneous levels of discontent, but the socioeconomic and governance
situations facing their citizens shape the development of future threats to the
regime and are thus targets for information collection. However, two difficulties that are important subjects for future work on the information politics of
dictatorships arise. First, how do the elites’ data-collecting enterprises shape
the incentives and actions of local agents as well as society’s under their rule?
Second, is the information collected and released by nondemocratic regimes
likely to be subject to manipulation for political reasons?
Investigation into these questions is most developed in the case of
China’s regime. The work on the double-edged nature of local discretion
in China is based on the idea that local governments are judged by a series
of quantitative metrics. The center, then, attempts to create a system of
information collection that focuses on what needs to be observed and how.
The regime’s emphasis has been to collect quantitative metrics of economic
performance, population growth, social stability, and, increasingly, the
environment. These metrics shape the behavior of local actors in ways
both beneficial—promoting economic growth—and detrimental—wasted
resources and corruption—to the central regime’s interests.
The second future direction for work on information politics in dictatorships is on the possibility and reality of data manipulation. Work by Xiao
and Womack as well as Wallace has begun to explore this topic.33 As Xiao
and Womack write:
Behind the problems of credibility of public official information in China lie
two patterns of internal information distortion, one restricting the downward
flow of sensitive general information and the other filtering the upward flow of
local information. Information gathered at the center is increasingly restricted
as it is transmitted down the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the ‘facts on the ground’
are sifted by local official interests at each level of upward transmittal.34

Xiao and Womack establish with survey data of local officials in China that
there exists real concern that the official statistics reflect the reality “on the
ground.”
The problem can go beyond filtering. Local officials operating, as they do
in China, on a system that rewards local officials based on quantified performance metrics might have incentives to manipulate those performance
statistics. As Wallace writes:
33. Wallace (2014) and Xiao and Womack (2014).
34. Xiao and Womack (2014).

Information Politics in Dictatorships

7

Since citizens value economic development, hierarchical regimes interested in
monitoring lower level officials without undue auditing expenses can use economic statistics as information shortcuts. Lower-level officials, knowing the
statistics by which they are judged and having some control over the bureaucrats who create those statistics, have an incentive to juke [i.e. manipulate] the
stats. A center that judges sub-national officials using performance-based targets is often reliant on these same sub-national officials to supply them with
those performance estimates. This principal-agent problem bedevils a dictator
interested in creating an accountability mechanism for subordinates based on
economic data. Sub-national leaders may be rewarded on the basis of manipulated data since monitoring costs make it expensive to night impossible for
central authorities to know the real situation on the ground with certainty.

Such data manipulation at the local level can undermine the reputation of
the regime as a whole. On the other hand, such manipulations hold the potential to be useful at the national level as well.
Economic downturns are dangerous for dictators. In part, this danger arises
because the number of individuals holding grievances against the regime
increases. In addition, when such poor performance is officially acknowledged, the public as a whole is aware of the bad times and as such may be
more able to coordinate collective action against the regime.35 However, if a
regime can successfully manipulate the public release of economic statistics,
it can muddy these waters. Some may stop seeing themselves as among a
large cohort negatively disposed to the regime. Individuals may well think
that they are, if not precisely, alone in their bad circumstances, then perhaps
part of a smaller slice of the population that has drawn the short end of
the stick in times of general plenty. Individuals who do not believe that the
citizenry is aggrieved enough to participate in or at least tacitly support revolutionary action are less likely to move forward with such seditious acts.
Such changes in general beliefs may be enough for a regime to avoid danger
in a precarious moment, one with revolutionary or coup potential.36
Dictators will never be able to know all of the threats that they face with
perfect certainty. The possibility that the sacrifice of a single individual in
response to the misbehavior of local agents might destroy the long-lived
regime of Ben Ali in Tunisia seemed beyond remote before its occurrence
in 2011. However, the ways in which dictators attempt to investigate the
threats that they do face, both from democratization and from other potential
nondemocratic regimes, remain fertile ground for social science research.
In the end, it is clear that the fall of the Eastern European Communist
regimes in 1989 did not mark the end of history; capitalist democracy
remains ascendant, but it is far from universal. As such, it is incumbent on
35. Hollyer et al. (2011).
36. On revolutionary moments, see, for instance, Acemoglu and Robinson (2005).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

researchers to explore the politics of nondemocratic regimes. These politics
are the politics of dangers, collecting information about those dangers, and
the ways in which that information gathering can shape the contours of
governance.
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JEREMY L. WALLACE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jeremy L. Wallace is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Ohio
State University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2009.
His research examines the politics of nondemocratic societies, particularly
contemporary China. Using cross-national and Chinese data, his first
book—Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in
China—details the threats that cities pose for authoritarian regimes, regime
responses to those threats such as China’s management of urbanization, and
how those responses can backfire by exacerbating the growth of slums and
cities. His research has been published in the Journal of Politics, British Journal
of Political Science, and Global Environmental Change, among others.
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Information Politics in Dictatorships

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