Data Demobilized: Data Bifurcation and the Knowledge Economy in Hybrid Regimes

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy

Abstract

As hybrid regimes attempt to transition to the knowledge economy, they need to foster data transparency to promote economic growth. Yet as conventional literature notes, increased data and information flow is politically risky – it can weaken regime stability by revealing citizen preferences and government incompetence. How do hybrid regimes manage this tension? How do they determine an optimal level of data transparency that balances between economic needs and political stability? What strategies do they employ to achieve this delicate equilibrium? While the existent literature on political control and comparative political economy has examined how autocrats strategically manage economic liberalization when developing the industrial economy (Gallagher, 2002; Plantan, 2020), it offers us little theoretical or empirical traction over the unique political-economic cross pressures faced by hybrid regimes when developing knowledge economies, which require a relatively free flow of ideas and information.

In this paper, I develop and test a novel theory. I argue that hybrid regimes utilize a strategy I term ‘bifurcation’ to balance economic needs and political imperatives when governing data transparency. I conceptualize bifurcation as a political control strategy where hybrid regimes differentiate their treatment of sensitive and non-sensitive data types and data processes. I test the theory using the cases of Singapore and Malaysia, leveraging a mixed methods approach. I use OLS regression on a novel dataset of 50,000 Parliamentary Question and Answer replies from 2013 to 2017, and analyze several dozen interviews conducted with bureaucrats and civil society actors in Malaysia and Singapore. I find that hybrid regimes provide statistics with higher levels of granularity, regularity, and comparative usefulness for non-sensitive topics than for sensitive topics. I also find that they provide accessible and institutionalized channels for non-sensitive data processes but unclear and informal channels for sensitive ones.

This manuscript contributes to the literatures on political control and comparative political economy in several ways. First, scholars of political control have noted that hybrid and authoritarian regimes are moving away from violent and overt forms of coercion to covert and nonviolent forms of repression (Hassan et al., 2019; Guriev and Treisman, 2020). This paper identifies a novel repertoire of political control strategies within this context of growing authoritarian sophistication. Second, to the comparative political economy literature, I offer a new theory for how hybrid regimes manage information flow as they transition to economies rooted in the spread of ideas and information. As hybrid regimes continue to develop and transition, the tensions between economic growth and political stability will only grow more acute; understanding how they manage this tradeoff will be central to understanding their political and economic behavior.

Author

• Hui-Yuan Neo, Cornell University