On December 24, 2001, millions of Russians were glued to their televisions as Vladimir Putin, the new president of Russia, took to the stage in the first “Direct Line with the President of the Russian Federation”Footnote 1 – a call-in program where the Russian leader spoke directly with his constituents on the problems of the day. Over the next two and a half hours, Putin took questions from ordinary Russians on issues from road construction and housing utilities to economic and foreign policy. He lauded the program as an important forum for direct communication between authorities and citizens and emphasized its role as a means to learn about and respond to citizen concerns.
Today, Russia is widely acknowledged as a personalist hegemonic authoritarian regime where there is little competition for power but rulers still promote some façade of democratic procedures.Footnote 2 Over the course of his twenty-year rule, Putin has jailed and killed opponents, subordinated officials, eliminated independent media, invaded sovereign countries, and slowly but definitively limited avenues for political participation and expression. Yet, these more authoritarian tactics exist side-by-side with a façade of democratic participation – “acts that are intended to influence the behavior of those empowered to make decisions”Footnote 3 – including programs such as the Direct Line. While Russia has increasingly moved toward a typical “fear dictatorship” in recent years,Footnote 4 this combination of authoritarian manipulation and control with seemingly democratic elements exemplified the first decades of the Putin state and constitute an important part of the Kremlin’s menu of manipulation.Footnote 5 Although it is impossible to directly identify the intentions of leaders like Putin in adopting such tactics,Footnote 6 it is nevertheless important to consider why they may choose to do so by examining the benefits and advantages participatory institutions afford to them. What leads authorities to create and maintain strategies to encourage societal participation and input – and at what cost?
Russia is not alone in its use of participation as a tool of authoritarian rule. Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela “staked its legitimacy” on the expansion of participatory opportunities, even as it eroded the country’s democratic institutions and consolidated power in the hands of the executive.Footnote 7 China has expanded channels for dialogue between officials and citizens to signal democratic decision-making and opportunity for citizen voice.Footnote 8 Singapore’s anocracy combines a lack of genuine competition with small, bounded doses of contestation and participation.Footnote 9 The communications revolution and the expansion of electronic government systems has created even more opportunities for autocrats to project legitimacy and responsiveness to citizens and the international community while simultaneously broadening their control over society.Footnote 10
Today, nearly every country in the world promotes some form of citizen engagement and participation in politics. But the proliferation of participatory institutions in authoritarian regimes has not resulted in the consolidation of democracy, as some early observers had hoped. Rather, these tools “violate the liberal-democratic principles of freedom and fairness so profoundly and systematically so as to render [them] instruments of authoritarian rule.”Footnote 11 Nevertheless, these tools and their role as instruments of authoritarian control remain undertheorized. This book examines the tools nondemocracies use to simulate democratic participation. Why do nondemocracies, with their capacity for coercion and co-optation, foster opportunities for citizen participation? How do people understand these institutions, and how do they influence citizen attitudes toward the regime and personal perceptions of voice? Do these institutions actually affect politics in meaningful ways, and if so, how? What benefits do they provide the regime, and what are the potential costs for authorities?
This book argues that autocrats create and maintain what I call participatory technologies – elite–mass communication strategies that foster two-way interaction between citizens and leaders – to manage information dilemmas and build regime legitimacy.Footnote 12 Participatory technologies are bounded modes of participation and contestation defined by the state; they promote dialogue between authorities and the masses but limit full participation in political life and contestation of government policies. At the same time, they are not the simple promise of benefits in exchange for support, nor are they merely a virtual parade of strawman organizations and parties meant to dazzle citizens while offering little in return. Instead, participatory technologies act as a means for authorities to balance these democratic and authoritarian elements to create unique spaces for political exchange. These strategies are closely monitored and controlled by authorities yet still allow individuals a managed voice in the political process and a means to address their concerns. Like other outwardly democratic institutions and practices, such as elections, legislatures, and protests, participatory technologies in nondemocracies combine “democratic rules with authoritarian governance”Footnote 13 to balance citizen participation with elite manipulation.
Participatory technologies are a central component of what some scholars have termed “consultative authoritarianism,” a form of autocratic rule wherein elites use communication tools to collect information about citizen preferences and subsequently take those preferences into account when designing policy.Footnote 14 These strategies take such forms as appeals systems, public consultations, government blogs, and call-in shows. In China, the Communist Party has introduced a series of input channels, such as the National People’s Congress’ online participation portal, mayoral mailboxes, and the program “Share Your Thoughts with Premier Li,” where citizens can voice their opinions directly to various government actors. Singapore’s aptly named Feedback Unit encourages public input on policy issues through various discussion fora and direct communication with leaders. Kazakhstan has developed a complex electronic government system through which citizens can consult on draft policy, communicate with officials and ministries, and complain to authorities. In Russia, President Putin participates in a live question-and-answer session called “The Direct Line with Vladimir Putin,” in which he discusses issues and concerns raised by members of the general public. In this live call-in session, the president has direct contact with ordinary citizens and addresses their particular concerns, frequently making policy recommendations and promising action to address issues raised during the course of the broadcast.
While existing scholarship has examined individual instances of participatory technologies around the world, this book develops a comprehensive theory about the use, benefits, and, importantly, the limitations of participatory technologies as a tool of contemporary authoritarianism. I rely on a detailed study of Russia to make the argument that participatory technologies can build popular legitimacy for authoritarian regimes, act as an information gathering and dissemination tool, and provide oversight and control of lower-level bureaucrats and officials. Autocrats utilize these strategies to engage their citizens in the political process and legitimate their right to govern. Instead of being relegated to the status of mere bystanders in the political discourse, ordinary people are encouraged to take an active role in its construction. By explicitly, if perhaps disingenuously, engaging individuals in the political conversation, autocrats are able to manage public opinion and increase legitimacy while limiting the uncertainty and potential loss of control often associated with citizen participation. However, participatory technologies, like all strategies of authoritarian control, are not without their drawbacks. Ultimately, they require citizen involvement to be effective. If citizens refuse to buy participatory technologies as a genuine means of voice or become disillusioned with them over time, their ability to act as tools of authoritarian legitimation and information management will wane.
1.1 Problems of Authoritarian Rule
For some, the typical picture of authoritarian rule is that of a strongman presiding over a population through fear and repression. It invokes images of terrified masses unable to participate in political life without fears of retribution and repression until, finally, citizens take to the streets and overthrow the dictator. In this scenario, autocrats rule by coercion until they become so out of touch with public opinion that they are taken by surprise by mass discontent and overthrown. Due to the danger of mass uprisings, we should expect that autocrats take steps to prevent popular discontent from becoming destabilizing. Yet, studies of everyday authoritarian politics often privilege elites and opposition – not the masses – in sustaining autocratic rule.
This need to understand how autocrats manage, co-opt, and control the public gets at the core concern and the driving question of this book: How do autocrats balance the need to understand and adapt to the mood of the population with the desire to remain the dominant political force? Although an important concern for all governments, this question is particularly critical for nondemocracies, where leaders risk their assets, their livelihoods, and even their lives if they lose power.
Given the severe consequences of misjudging the mood of society and levels of support for the regime, autocrats are incentivized to develop tools that help them uncover information about society and gain legitimacy. These goals are closely intertwined. Building and gauging legitimacy requires detailed knowledge of society; without information, legitimacy is all but impossible to secure. However, both of these goals are difficult to achieve for nondemocratic leaders. Unlike democracies, with the institutionalized support for their right to govern and means of receiving feedback from the population, leaders in nondemocracies suffer from problems of information and legitimacy.
1.1.1 The Problem of Information
Authoritarian regimes often appear inevitable until they are not. The Soviet Union collapsed seemingly overnight, even as many commentators marveled at the remarkable stability of the union. When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, “virtually no Western experts, Soviet or foreign officials, or Soviet reformers foresaw the impending collapse of the system.”Footnote 15 This failure of foresight was, in many ways, a consequence of the Soviet system’s informational structure. Information about the state of the Soviet economy flowed from the top down. Though not in and of itself a feature unique to the Soviet system, this vertical flow of information took place within a “vastly larger plan” for the Soviet economy.Footnote 16 Mechanisms existed for lower-level officials to provide feedback on the state of the economy and central plan goals, but there was little incentive for producers and administrators to provide an accurate estimation of the state of the economy. As a result, leadership had at best a skewed sense of the actual situation on the ground. “For all one knows,” Walter Laqueur (Reference Laqueur1997, p. 136) wrote, “the Soviet leaders (certainly under Brezhnev) were as ignorant as the Sovietologists about the real state of the economy, because they were misled by their underlings, who, in turn, were misinformed by the local informants.” Gorbachev’s attempts to address this crisis of information – by opening the Soviet system to greater consultation and dissemination of information (glasnost) – instead accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union as systemic problems were revealed. In short, the collapse of the Soviet Union can be partially attributed to problems of information.
Accurate, free-flowing information is a necessary condition for long-term regime stabilityFootnote 17: The more information authorities have about society, the more able they are to identify areas of concern before discontent boils over. Furthermore, information helps autocrats identify corrupt officials who make citizens unhappy and are otherwise incentivized to hide poor behavior from the regime.Footnote 18 However, widely available information about society can also undermine autocratic rule. Just as information can reveal to the government societal discontent, so too can it aggregate grievances and show citizens that their discontent is shared by others, increasing the ease by which regime opponents can foment anti-regime action. A dictator who allows information to flow unchecked is one who risks losing power. Authoritarian regimes must therefore restrict how information is passed horizontally from citizen to citizen. As a result, nondemocracies frequently censor, suppress, or outright eliminate institutions that provide information, such as competitive elections, civil society, and the press, alongside repression of citizens to disincentivize protest. But by limiting the flow of horizontal information, authorities also limit the flow of vertical information – from citizen to government, and vice versa – that is essential to authoritarian survival. Regimes can seem stable because people are afraid to tell the truth, leading observers and officials to incorrectly estimate public opinion and support. Consequently, small-scale discontent can spread like a “prairie fire,”Footnote 19 ultimately destabilizing the regime.
In short, fear and repression reinforce each other. Citizens in authoritarian regimes fear repression should they choose to vocalize their opinions. As a result, they have little incentive to provide autocrats with accurate information. This encourages autocrats to further repress citizens and eliminate information gathering institutions in order to keep discontent from publicly spreading and to limit the ability of the people to protest. This cycle results in what scholars call “the dictator’s dilemma.”Footnote 20 Dictators, Wintrobe (Reference Wintrobe1998, p. 20) writes, “cannot – either by using force or the threat of force, or by promises, even of vast sums of money or chunks of their empires – know whether the population genuinely worships them or worships them because they command such worship.”
1.1.2 The Problem of Legitimacy
Repression not only decreases the amount of information autocrats receive from the population. It also can reduce legitimacy.Footnote 21 Legitimacy, according to Lipset (Reference Lipset and Blondel1969, p. 77), is “the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society.” Thus, a legitimate regime faces low risk of protest and popular rebellion, as the citizenry generally accepts its right to govern even if there are disagreements on the margins. Legitimacy is a multidimensional concept that is based on both the inputs and outputs of a political system. On the one hand, input or process legitimacy refers to the mechanisms and procedures that link political decision-making to citizens’ concerns and preferences.Footnote 22 On the other, output or performance legitimacy refers to the effectiveness of policy outcomes as a result of this process.
In consolidated democracies, governments derive legitimacy through the institutionalization of free, fair, and competitive elections and other forms of political participation. Unlike their democratically elected counterparts, autocrats do not have the built-in legitimacy of having been chosen through competitive elections. Instead, they must look for other ways to gain legitimacy in the eyes of their citizenry. Claims of legitimacy are central to authoritarian persistence – legitimation secures consent and compliance with regime rules and stymies claims by the opposition.Footnote 23 Without legitimacy, authorities struggle to stay in power in the long term.
However, attempts at legitimation can also constrain authorities’ actions. Whereas legitimacy is an attitude held by citizens toward a regime,Footnote 24 legitimation refers to the “process through which legitimacy is procured.”Footnote 25 As von Soest and Grauvogel (Reference Soest and Grauvogel2017) show, legitimation strategies are not the sole purview of democratic regimes: Regimes with “democratic deficits” also carefully employ a combination of strategies to cultivate legitimacy among citizens and elites that may look familiar to democratic audiences. Indeed, Geddes (Reference Geddes2005) finds that authoritarian survival is correlated with the presence of democratic institutions.
There are several potential benefits and drawbacks associated with the use of these legitimation strategies. Performance legitimacy – the delivery of material well-being and security – can boost citizens’ beliefs in the authorities’ right to rule,Footnote 26 but it also limits how many rents authorities can steal to line their own pockets. Autocrats can also attempt to increase process legitimacy by creating formal institutions that mimic choice in leaders (e.g., elections), but these institutions may ultimately be used to remove them from power. Therefore, it is essential that autocrats find ways to gain legitimacy to enhance long-term stability while limiting constraints on their power.
Problems of legitimacy are closely tied to problems of information. Authoritarian legitimation relies on the popular belief that the political system is the most appropriate and proper for society and that decision-making is tied to public preferences.Footnote 27 If autocrats are to legitimize their rule in the long term, then they must be able to accurately evaluate political attitudes. However, as described earlier, public opinion is frequently repressed in nondemocracies and citizens are incentivized to misrepresent their opinion, making it difficult for autocrats to accurately understand support for the regime.Footnote 28 How, then, do autocrats overcome these two intertwined problems?
1.1.3 Overcoming the Dilemmas: The Autocrat’s Democratic Playbook
If twentieth-century autocracies were dominated by the rule of fear, characterized by violent repression and comprehensive censorship, autocracies of the early twenty-first century frequently concern themselves with building and preserving public support. According to Guriev and Treisman (Reference Guriev and Treisman2019, abstract), “[i]n recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information.” Given the limitations of repression in maintaining a supportive population, contemporary autocrats have expanded their toolkit to balance the need for information and legitimacy on the one hand and control on the other. In other words, they have adapted and expanded their menu of manipulation in order to gather necessary information while legitimating their rule. Nondemocracies bolster (or claim to bolster) political, economic, and social performance to satisfy demands for material welfare and security and to increase performance or output legitimacy.Footnote 29 Meanwhile, they create and maintain “adequate” democratic institutions and procedures to build process or input legitimacy and put forward a rhetoric of performance and responsiveness.Footnote 30
Scholars of nondemocracies have established that seemingly “democratic” institutions not only exist in nondemocratic environments, but also consolidate autocratic rule by encouraging compliance and facilitating co-optation of the populace.Footnote 31 However, formal institutions such as elections and legislatures are only one part of a larger universe of democratic techniques available to autocrats. Furthermore, while scholars have identified the masses as a cornerstone of authoritarian rule,Footnote 32 considerable work remains to explain how autocrats manage the public beyond the use of repression, economic performance, and formal institutions.Footnote 33 Bridging this gap, I argue, requires consideration of tools explicitly aimed at engaging the masses and shaping their relationship with authorities – in other words, participatory technologies.
This book examines how authoritarian regimes use participatory technologies to overcome the twin problems of information and legitimacy. By providing opportunities for nonelectoral participation in otherwise closed political systems, participatory technologies strengthen the flow of information between citizens and the government and demonstrate to citizens that the authorities are attentive to the needs, concerns, and mood of society. They “perform (an illusion of) democracy”Footnote 34 and perpetuate a system of symbolic state-building that shapes the relationship between state and society.Footnote 35
Moreover, participatory technologies mimic democratic forms of participation without the constraints of more formal institutions. They are “elite-enabling” institutions, which generate public support without necessarily constraining elite behavior.Footnote 36 Participatory technologies do not necessarily hold authorities accountable to the same extent as formal democratic institutions, nor do they necessitate responsiveness to the public in decision-making. Rather, participatory technologies promote a sense of virtual immediacy – of direct communication between ordinary citizens and their leaders – without requiring increased accountability or responsiveness. While authorities can, and sometimes do, use these technologies to respond to citizen demands (a point addressed extensively through this book), participatory technologies allow authorities to cultivate a rhetoric of performance without necessarily requiring improved governance or responsiveness. Instead, they “cannibalize the look of democracy in order to create the illusion of direct, personal contact between a powerful, but responsive government (vlast’) and the ‘people’ (narod).”Footnote 37 By promoting such strategies, autocrats encourage citizens to believe that they have a role in the political process – that citizens have the opportunity to communicate to the government their needs, concerns, and opinions – while still maintaining control of the means and content of communication. In short, via participatory technologies, autocrats present a façade of democratic governance and accountability to bolster perceptions of voice and improve views of the regime without undermining the existing political order.
1.2 Why Russia?
Participatory technologies can be found in some form in nearly every country in the world. This book focuses on Russia in order to provide a detailed examination of how these tools aid nondemocracies in overcoming the problems of information and legitimacy and, importantly, how and when they fail.Footnote 38 Russia is an ideal case for exploring participatory technologies in action due to its long history of combining democratic institutions with authoritarian control and its contemporary use of sophisticated and innovative techniques to legitimize the ruling power. Participatory technologies have been used by authorities in Russia going back to the Russian Empire, where the tradition of “petitioning the tsar” was common practice. During the Soviet era, particularized contacting, the practice of directly contacting officials to solve private issues, became one of the few channels by which citizens could seek to have their grievances addressed.Footnote 39 Under Vladimir Putin, these historic practices were given new life and hold a key place in Russia’s menu of manipulation. The Kremlin has experimented with multiple forms of participatory technologies, from electronic government and online complaint systems to civic chambers, in its bid to control information flows, influence public opinion, and bolster regime legitimacy. Indeed, Russia’s role as a key innovator of participatory technologies has led to their techniques being used and adapted by other authoritarian governments around the world.Footnote 40
When Putin first came to power in 2000, observers expected that the new regime would encourage Russia along the path to democracy. An article from The New York Times in early 2000 described Putin as “democratic to the marrow.”Footnote 41 Twenty years later, these initial expectations have proven ill-founded. During Putin’s first two terms as president, authorities sought to build a specific type of managed democracy, termed “sovereign democracy” (suverennaya demokratiya) in 2006 by Putin’s then-chief ideologue Vladislav Surkov. Sovereign democracy retained the trappings of democracy and democratic pluralism while simultaneously using the powers of the state to increase the regime’s control over society.Footnote 42 This system, according to Nikolai Petrov (Reference Petrov2005, p. 182), is founded on the basic ideas of democracy but with “control over actors, over institutions, and over the rules of the game … which makes it possible for authorities to avoid being controlled by society while preserving a mask of democratic procedure.” During the first few years of Putin’s rule, democratic institutions were weakened and placed under greater state control, but some forms of genuine pluralism remained.
However, Russia’s managed democracy has since given way to hegemonic authoritarianism characterized by strict control of the media, the violation of civil and political liberties, aggressive silencing of opposition, the destruction of genuine pluralism, and the centralization of power – repressive tactics that have only increased in scope and severity with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Yet these authoritarian tactics coexist alongside ostensibly democratic forms of participation and communication. Given the Kremlin’s tight control over the political arena, why do authorities promote opportunities for participation? What benefits do these strategies provide to the regime?
This book starts with the observation that contemporary authoritarian regimes rely on a variety of tools for the maintenance of their rule and that explanations of authoritarian durability need to more thoroughly and systematically incorporate state-sponsored participatory opportunities into these conversations. Explanations that center co-optation cannot explain widespread stability or support for the regime, as only a small segment of the population is usually able to be co-opted. Coercion, though it may be an important tool for limiting opposition and controlling dissent in the short term, can harm regime durability in the long run.Footnote 43 Given the limitations of these tactics, contemporary authoritarian regimes have developed “a new type of authoritarianism” that combines democratic practices with autocratic control to influence public opinion, gather information about society, and shape the boundaries of citizen participation in political life.Footnote 44 That is not to say coercion and co-optation no longer constitute items in the autocrats’ menu of manipulation, as present-day Russia aptly illustrates. Rather, these “informational autocracies” also embrace democratic institutions, including nonelectoral forms of participation, and rely on the extensive use of communication, propaganda, and information management to preserve popular approval.Footnote 45 Indeed, contemporary autocrats often enjoy widespread popularity and support.Footnote 46 This book seeks to understand one of the tactics used by authoritarian regimes to build this support and increase authoritarian durability.
According to Surkov (Reference Surkov2019), a key hallmark of the “Putin state” is the creation of “trusting communication and interaction between the supreme ruler and the citizens.”Footnote 47 Few observers would take this narrative at face value, particularly given the extensive evidence of state corruption at the highest levels and increasing use of repression.Footnote 48 However, this narrative can tell us much about the ways that the Putin state is organized and why participatory technologies, such as the Direct Line, continue to exist in Russia today. The Direct Line, a question-and-answer program between Vladimir Putin and ordinary Russians, is used in this book as a key empirical example of participatory technologies in authoritarian contexts. Although often dismissed by observers as simply unpersuasive propaganda, the Direct Line is an influential case of participatory technologies in Russia;Footnote 49 as the most prominent form of participatory technology in the country, the Direct Line exemplifies a broader strategy by the Putin administration to create bounded forms of participation that limit and closely manage citizen input into politics while at the same time limiting more formal means of participation.
Finally, Russia is a useful case to examine the limitations of participatory technologies. One of the key takeaways of this book is that, while participatory technologies can contribute to authoritarian durability, they also have the very real potential to become ineffective or to even backfire against authorities, particularly in the long term. In recent years, the Putin regime has begun to deprioritize informational strategies and to rely more heavily on the use of repressive tactics. Following the most recent wave of repression in 2022, few would argue that Russia today remains an informational autocracy. While participatory technologies continue to be utilized by the regime, they hold a less central place in authorities’ overall toolkit than in the first two decades of Putinism. As a result, Russia provides a unique opportunity to examine a case of movement away from this softer form of authoritarianism and to provide insights as to why this may occur. While the majority of the research on which this book is based was conducted during the height of Russia’s informational autocracy, the findings point to inherent weaknesses in this type of regime and how it may decay over time. To be clear, this book does not attribute the increasing repressiveness of the Putin regime to the deterioration of participatory technologies. Rather, it helps explain how, why, and under what circumstances participatory technologies may become less effective as tools of legitimation and information management. This book seeks to better understand the function of these strategies, the extent to which they benefit authoritarian regimes, and their potential drawbacks and shortcomings. It encourages scholars to take seriously these often-overlooked tools in the study of autocratic innovation and resilience.
1.3 Contributions
This book makes several important contributions to the scholarly understanding of nondemocratic regime durability. In recent years, scholarship has expanded our understanding of the complexity of authoritarian regime dynamics. This focus on nondemocracies has shone a light on the strategies available to co-opt and repress opposition and to cultivate mass support (or the illusion of mass support), among others. However, our understanding of the full range of legitimation strategies available to autocrats, and how effective those strategies actually are in practice, remains incomplete. This book tackles the question of how autocrats attempt to build legitimacy among their populations while simultaneously reinforcing their control of political life and the extent to which these attempts are successful.
Early studies of authoritarianism were primarily concerned with defining, theorizing, and creating typologies of different types of authoritarian regimes.Footnote 50 This research has opened the door to more in-depth consideration of how and why autocracies work the way they do. This book starts from the premise that contemporary authoritarian regimes often – though not always – rely on information management and communication as a cornerstone of their rule.Footnote 51 Rather than categorizing these strategies as simple manipulation or propaganda that have little impact on their intended audiences, this book takes seriously the questions of why autocrats choose to use participatory technologies in their menu of manipulation and how citizens respond to and play a role in their construction.Footnote 52 While this book explores the development of communicative strategies by autocrats, it does so while acknowledging the centrality of citizen participation in the construction and perpetuation of these strategies. In other words, this book seeks to better understand why individuals in nondemocracies “willingly consent to authoritarian rule.”Footnote 53 Moreover, by examining both the communicative techniques that autocrats use to maintain their rule and citizens’ reaction to them, this book addresses the circumstances under which participatory technologies can shore up authoritarian regimes and when they may fall short. In short, this is a book about citizen dialogue with the dictator and its implications for authoritarian durability.
Most classifications of authoritarian regimes, Gorgulu et al. (Reference Gorgulu, Sharafutdinova and Steinbuks2020, p. 5) argue, do not usually consider the role of formalized, nonelectoral participation channels within state institutions.Footnote 54 This book adds to the conversation on information management and participation in authoritarian regimes by examining an understudied and undertheorized tool for overcoming information dilemmas and fostering the flow of information between the rulers and the ruled: what I call “participatory technologies.” Scholarship has examined particular examples of participatory technologies around the world – from Mayor’s Mailboxes in China to Singapore’s Feedback Unit and call-in programs in Chavez’s Venezuela. To my knowledge, however, this study is the first to forward a general theory of participatory technologies in nondemocracies. Rather than focusing on the unique features of particular examples, I argue, scholars must consider why autocrats pursue these broad types of strategies and better understand their benefits and limitations across political contexts.
Rather than offering information about overall levels of support, as competitive elections do, participatory technologies provide detailed insight into the issues, locales, and officials that are of primary concern to citizens. Participatory technologies increase vertical flows of information (from authorities to citizens and vice versa) and limit horizontal flows between citizens, while still allowing the authorities to control political messaging. However, information is only one part of the puzzle. As argued earlier, information dilemmas are deeply intertwined with issues of legitimacy. Sincere public approval is crucial to authoritarian durability,Footnote 55 but authoritarian regimes have tools at their disposal to influence public opinion.Footnote 56 This book seeks to understand whether and how state-sponsored participatory institutions influence perceptions of nondemocratic leaders and citizens’ own roles in the political process. Although scholarship has explored whether participatory opportunities actually influence policy in nondemocracies or are merely window dressing,Footnote 57 we still know very little about how these institutions actually influence citizens’ perceptions of autocrats and their own sense of voice. While existing scholarship generally presumes that these techniques influence attitudes in nondemocracies, there is relatively little research that actually tests these assumed relationships.Footnote 58 This question is crucial for assessing whether the tactics pursued by informational autocracies actually contribute to authoritarian durability or, as some scholars argue, are simple manipulations with little impact.Footnote 59 In this book, I demonstrate that participatory technologies can reinforce legitimacy by actively involving citizens in the political process and the construction of the political narrative. Furthermore, the impact of these strategies cannot be attributed to co-optation or policy concessions: Awareness of participatory technologies influences approval of the autocrat even when the regime fails to improve citizens’ lives through this channel of communication, at least in the short term. By permitting opportunities for voice in contexts where institutionalized forms of communication and participation are comparatively limited, autocrats can improve perceptions of the regime and citizens’ role in politics – to a point.
Importantly, this book focuses not on participation in these avenues for expressing voice but rather on awareness of them. Most studies of participatory opportunities focus on how direct participation can influence political attitudes and behaviors.Footnote 60 However, few individuals are eager to actively participate in nonelectoral politics, regardless of the regime under which they live. If participation and communication strategies influenced the opinion only of participants, their effects would be limited in scope and overall impact. That is not to say that participation in these strategies has no impact on political attitudes, but rather that focusing only on participation and participants is needlessly narrow due to low levels of participation in these processes. While participation in formal institutions may be limited, people are eager to know that opportunities for participation exist, should they choose to exercise this right. In order to truly understand the role and influence of participatory technologies in nondemocratic contexts, we must expand our definition of “participation” to adequately reflect the realities of life and politics under autocratic rule. This conceptual maneuver has important consequences for future studies of the impact of political communication and for policymaking in general. Scholars must broaden their scope of analysis to look beyond participation in deliberative practices. Policymakers, instead of maintaining a focus on encouraging participation in government-citizen interactions, should strive to expand citizens’ awareness of their existence. Political communication can have a much broader impact than is currently supposed, and it is imperative that future scholarship reflects this reality.
Moreover, this book focuses not on responsiveness but rather on simulated responsiveness.Footnote 61 Extant research has frequently considered the question of whether and how participatory opportunities in nondemocracies can improve government responsiveness,Footnote 62 which has in turn been shown to have important benefits for regime support and legitimacy.Footnote 63 While I do address questions of responsiveness, it is not the primary subject of this book. Rather, this book focuses on the ways that opportunities for participation can influence attitudes toward the regime without necessitating systemic changes to policy or governance. Although authorities may, and often do, choose to respond to citizen concerns, a hallmark of participatory technologies is that they provide many of the benefits of genuine participation, at least in the short term, without constraining elite behavior and promoting government accountability. However, promoting a façade of government responsiveness while failing to respond to citizen demands is not sustainable in the long term and may ultimately reinforce existing negative attitudes of the regime, a prospect that I consider in depth throughout this book.
This finding highlights the limitations and counter effects of participatory technologies on authoritarian durability. Scholarship has widely acknowledged that contemporary authoritarian regimes frequently subvert democratic institutions for their own gain. However, there is limited understanding of the ways in which doing so may actually prove detrimental to authorities. One of the key findings of this book is that participatory technologies bolster the attitudes of the leading authority primarily among regime proponents and the politically disengaged. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that these strategies successfully convert critics of the regime. In fact, awareness of participatory technologies can actually reinforce negative attitudes of the government among critics, deepening existing antipathy. In short, although participatory technologies can help shore up autocracies, they also have the ability to polarize society and may ultimately backfire against the regime with potentially destabilizing consequences.
This finding points to the importance of examining the heterogeneous effects of managed political participation. All citizens are not equally susceptible to the discourse conveyed by participatory technologies, nor are they affected in the same way. This book argues that studies of political behavior must carefully examine the conditional impact of political strategies; merely investigating the average effects of participatory technologies on political attitudes obscures important variation in the influence of participatory technologies on particular sub-groups.
The potential of participatory technologies to backfire also provides insights into the limitations of these strategies and the contexts under which they are most likely to be used and to succeed. First, because participatory technologies primarily reinforce legitimacy among existing supporters and the politically disengaged, they are more likely to be developed and maintained in regimes that already have existing levels of popular support. The fact that these strategies do not convert regime skeptics and can actually reinforce negative views of authorities means that they are unlikely to be used by authoritarian governments with low levels of preexisting legitimacy and support and those which are particularly vulnerable to public dissent. Moreover, as Chapter 3 demonstrates, participatory technologies can take many forms. Some prioritize direct communication with the highest leader in the land; others are less personalized and more technocratic in nature. Which varieties of participatory technologies emerge, therefore, is dependent on countries’ particular political context. This book considers the different forms participatory technologies can take and examines them in depth in the context of a highly personalized authoritarian regime – Russia.
This book focuses on the development and role of participatory technologies in nondemocracies. However, these tools are not limited only to nondemocratic regimes. Indeed, participatory technologies are beneficial to autocrats precisely because they simulate participatory opportunities frequently found in democracies while minimizing the constraints on government power and control. As I argue in the Conclusion, participatory technologies are not inherently undemocratic; rather, they are simply tools that can be used by authorities for democratic or undemocratic ends. Unlike many types of formal participatory institutions, these strategies do not necessitate systemic responsiveness and accountability. As a result, they are particularly useful for autocrats and autocratically minded leaders looking to expand their control, particularly when they are used as substitutes for more elite-constraining participatory institutions. This insight into the relationship between participatory institutions and government accountability (or lack thereof) points to new avenues of research into the development, use, and consequences of participatory institutions across regime type.
1.4 Outline of This Book
This book proceeds as follows. In Chapter 2, I present a theory of how nondemocracies use participatory technologies to shore up their regimes. This chapter theorizes that participatory technologies serve two primary, inter-related functions for nondemocracies. First, they help autocrats overcome information dilemmas, acting as both a means of information gathering and dissemination and helping mitigate principal–agent problems. Second, I outline how participatory technologies can influence attitudes toward authorities, including measures of regime support and individuals’ own sense of voice. In particular, I argue that participatory technologies can bolster regime legitimacy by providing citizens with a form of much-needed – but rarely granted – political input. I reimagine Hirschman’s (1970) typology of exit, loyalty, and voice not as choices made by individuals, but rather as strategies used by authorities to encourage particular choices. In this framework, participatory technologies provide avenues for citizens to have input into politics. When avenues for participation are limited, as in nondemocratic contexts, participatory technologies give citizens the opportunity to become part of the political discourse, interacting directly with government officials and improving perceptions that authorities care about the opinions and concerns of ordinary citizens. Furthermore, I argue that individuals do not need to directly participate in these technologies to be influenced by them. Rather, simply being aware of the existence of participatory technologies can have positive effects on perceptions of the regime and its leaders.
I then develop a typology of different varieties of participatory technologies in Russia and around the world. Chapter 3 argues that participatory technologies vary along three key dimensions: informational output, individualization, and personalization, and that this variation influences the relative benefits and costs of particular participatory technologies for authorities. I then identify and detail three main types of participatory technologies – appeals systems, public consultations, and call-in shows – illustrating each of these ideal types through cases in Russia and around the world. This theory-building chapter illustrates important variation across different types of participatory technologies to better understand how particular characteristics may influence their relative risks and rewards. While all participatory technologies are designed to help autocrats bolster legitimacy and manage information flows, the opacity of informational output, extent of user and issue individualization, and level of personalization have important consequences for the potential success of each of these individual types, as well as the risks involved with their use.
Chapter 4 introduces the main empirical case of this study, “The Direct Line with Vladimir Putin.” An annual question-and-answer program in which Putin speaks with and discusses questions and concerns raised by members of the public, the Direct Line is Russia’s participatory technology par excellence. This chapter provides a comprehensive look at the development of the Direct Line from 2001 to 2022, a key period of autocratization in Russia. It draws on extensive fieldwork, including expert interviews, focus groups, and interviews with ordinary Russians collected over a span of six years; an original dataset of Direct Line broadcasts; and original survey data to make several related arguments. I compare the topics discussed in the Direct Line to concerns expressed by Russians in my interviews and surveys to show that the Direct Line, although staged and closely controlled by the government, reflects the genuine concerns of ordinary Russians. As a result, this participatory technology presents a credible claim that the government is aware of and sensitive to the needs of its people. I also rely on discourse analysis of the Direct Line broadcasts, original interviews and focus groups to argue that the Direct Line, like other participatory technologies, presents a channel through which people can directly communicate with the highest echelons of power and demonstrates to citizens that they have some form of input into politics.
After making the case that the Direct Line acts as a credible, if staged, form of communication and interaction between Putin and ordinary Russians, I then detail in Chapter 5 how the Direct Line aids the Kremlin in overcoming information dilemmas and building Putin’s public image. Although nondemocracies have a number of tools through which they can gather information about the populace, participatory technologies provide extensive information about citizen concerns and the behavior of officials without many of the drawbacks of other common information-gathering strategies. Expanding on the sources from Chapter 4, Chapter 5 argues how the Direct Line acts as a tool of information management by helping authorities gather information about society, providing a forum through which authorities can disseminate information to the public, and mitigating the principal–agent problem. Importantly, participatory technologies also help autocrats project an image of responsiveness and good governance. Finally, I analyze the Direct Line broadcasts to show how Putin uses this tool to build his public image, giving him a widely viewed platform to present himself as a competent manager, problem solver, and benevolent ruler. I substantiate these arguments using expert interviews, interviews and focus groups with ordinary Russians, qualitative content and discourse analysis of the Direct Line broadcasts, and media analysis.
Participatory technologies are only beneficial as a tool of information management insofar as people buy into the system – that is, they believe participatory technologies to be credible forms of communication with the authorities. In Chapter 6, I empirically test whether these strategies actually influence political attitudes. Relying on two original survey experiments and qualitative data from interviews and focus groups, I directly examine the impact of awareness of the Direct Line on approval of President Putin and perceptions of voice. Results suggest that participatory technologies have a positive impact on approval of the regime and citizens’ perceptions of voice. Furthermore, I use these experiments to assess whether this relationship is due solely to government responsiveness or some type of Putin effect, or if it can be attributed to the communicative format of the Direct Line. I find that while government responsiveness to citizen demands can and does improve attitudes toward authoritarian regimes,Footnote 64 the mere presence of participatory opportunities bolsters support regardless of whether and how authorities respond to these demands.
However, not all individuals are equally susceptible to government messaging. Chapter 7 analyzes the heterogeneous treatment effects of the experiments in Chapter 6 to assess how specific individual characteristics, particularly political awareness and priors, condition the impact of participatory technologies on attitudes toward the regime and individuals’ own perception of voice in politics. I find that individuals with low levels of political sophistication (those with limited interest and participation in politics) and individuals with pro-regime political priors are more likely to buy into government messaging. Interesting, individuals who hold anti-regime views are negatively influenced by awareness of these technologies, suggesting that participatory technologies may produce a frustration effect, ultimately leading to political backlash and polarization. Rather than assuring these individuals that the government cares about their ideas and concerns, the existence of participatory technologies reminds these individuals of the extent of government manipulation. While participatory technologies can contribute to nondemocratic regime maintenance, they, like all tools in the menu of manipulation, can ultimately lead to political polarization and open up the potential to backfire against the government. I further substantiate the trends found in the survey analysis with interview and focus group data.
In Chapter 8, I discuss the long-term implications of participatory technologies on regime durability and highlight how the benefits of participatory technologies may weaken over time as they fail to address citizen discontent. I then review the major findings and implications of this book before turning my attention from autocratic consolidation to democratic erosion. Focusing on the illustrative case of Venezuela, I show that although participatory technologies can strengthen autocratic rule by mimicking democracies, they can also be used by autocratically minded leaders in democracies to weaken government accountability and substitute for forms of participation that would impose actual constraints on elite behavior. I close by reviewing the broader implications of this study for scholarly understanding of authoritarian regimes.
