Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright
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without the regime having to actually pursue genuine reform. By emu-
lating elements o democracy, dictatorships can improve their attrac-
tiveness to citizens and deate the bottom-up pressure for change.DURABLE DIGITAL AUTOCRACIES
As autocracies have learned to co-opt new technologies, they have
become a more formidable threat to democracy. In particular, to-
day’s dictatorships have grown more durable. Between 1946 and
2000—the year digital tools began to proliferate—the typical dicta-
torship ruled for around ten years. Since 2000, this number has
more than doubled, to nearly 25 years.
Not only has the rising tide o technology seemingly bene¥ted all
dictatorships, but our own empirical analysis shows that those au-
thoritarian regimes that rely more heavily on digital repression are
among the most durable. Between 2000 and 2017, 37 o the 91 dicta-
torships that had lasted more than a year collapsed; those regimes that
avoided collapse had signi¥cantly higher levels o digital repression,
on average, than those that fell. Rather than succumb to what ap-
peared to be a devastating challenge to their power—the emergence
and spread o new technologies—many dictatorships leverage those
tools in ways that bolster their rule.
Although autocracies have long relied on various degrees o repres-
sion to support their objectives, the ease with which today’s authori-
tarian regimes can acquire this repressive capacity marks a signi¥cant
departure from the police states o the past. Building the eectiveness
and pervasiveness o the East German Stasi, for example, was not
something that could be achieved overnight. The regime had to culti-
vate the loyalty o thousands o cadres, training them and preparing
them to engage in on-the-ground surveillance. Most dictatorships
simply do not have the ability to create such a vast operation. There
was, according to some accounts, one East German spy for every 66
citizens. The proportion in most contemporary dictatorships (for
which there are data) pales in comparison. It is true that in North
Korea, which ranks as possibly the most intense police state in power
today, the ratio o internal security personnel and informants to citi-
zens is 1 to 40—but it was 1 to 5,090 in Iraq under Saddam Hussein
and 1 to 10,000 in Chad under Hissène Habré. In the digital age,
however, dictatorships don’t need to summon immense manpower to
eectively surveil and monitor their citizens.