Concentric Circles of Control: When Governments Expand Surveillance from Insiders

• In Event: The Evolution of Authoritarian Governance: Strategies, Ideology, and Institutions

Abstract

In authoritarian regimes, repression and surveillance are commonly seen as tools reserved for popular or elite threats to regime stability. However, certain surveillance technologies are often deployed starting low- to mid-level elite insiders, before being gradually expanded to broader parts of the population. This is especially the case if these new technologies rely on direct, unfettered access to the subjects of political control, which is most immediate for people already inside government institutions. While these insiders can provide governments with a testing ground for new tools of political control, it also risks turning regime insiders into opponents, rather than supporters, of these new technologies, which can slow down their deployment in the long run. To develop this argument, the paper focuses on state strategies for expanding informational capacity vis-à-vis their populations, with a particular focus on what I call “informational bottlenecks”. The first part conceptualizes and defines strategies of concentrically expanded political control that start with low- to mid-level regime insiders before gradually expanding to the entire population by drawing on qualitative evidence on cases from the GDR and the PRC. The second part presents an initial overview of the range of responses from regime insiders observed in these two cases and how governments build on this first stage by refining their technologies but can also run into obstacles due to internal opposition generated during the first stage. Empirically, I draw on qualitative and quantitative evidence from the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) cadre and labor databases between 1968 and 1975, with a focus on archival files, interviews and the GDR’s own archived databases, and the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) government’s use of information technologies as a means of exerting control over party members and government employees, drawing on on-going research including fieldwork. This paper contributes to the literature on institutional change in authoritarian contexts by showing how even rationally driven strategies of control are reshaped by the institutions through which they are deployed. It also contributes to our understanding of repression and surveillance in autocracies, by highlighting why and when states might target relatively harmless regime insiders, and work on informational capacity by exploring its origins.

Author

• Katharin Tai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology