مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

The Internet has been regarded as a “liberation technology” (Diamond, 2010) which facilitates the exchange of political information and the organization of collective action, thereby reducing asymmetries between citizens and states in political communication.1 From this perspective, digital technologies threaten the survival of authoritarian regimes, which typically rely on centralized information control.2 In line with this reasoning, the empirical literature on the adoption of the Internet mostly identified democracy advantages (Corrales & Westhoff, 2006; Guillén & Suárez, 2005; Milner, 2006). Yet phenomena like the booming Internet economy in China and the use of the web by approximately 30% of citizens in non-democratic countries (World Bank, 2015) contradict simplistic assumptions. While these phenomena have been recognized by conceptual works and case studies, the empirical literature on the adoption of the Internet by different political regimes has not taken recent developments into account. This paper extends this research conceptually, methodologically and empirically. It argues that the relationship between regime type and Internet diffusion needs to be understood as a dynamic process. The superior innovative capacity of democracies leads to a faster adoption of digital technologies, however, when the economic value of digital technologies rises with economies of scale, it is rational for autocratic rulers to encourage their use in economy and society in order to enhance the output performance of the regime. Meanwhile, the democratization risks are countered by a mix of political, economic and technical means to control information flows on the web.

To identify temporal variations in the relationship between regime type and Internet diffusion, this study implements crosssectional regressions for the years from 1996 to 2013 taking relevant control variables into account. It is also the first paper to test the effects of authoritarian regime subtypes. A growing literature in comparative politics has demonstrated that different types of authoritarian rule influence outcomes in a wide range of policy fields (Croissant & Wurster, 2013). The empirical results show a temporal democracy advantage in Internet diffusion and a catching up by autocracies lead by monarchies which even outperform democracies in 2013.

The article first reviews the empirical literature on Internet adoption in Section 2. Section 3 develops the theoretical framework that concentrates on regime type as the most important explanatory variable, while Section 4 explains the research design of the paper. The empirical results are presented and discussed in Section 5, before Section 6 concludes.