A Network Approach to the Generation of Knowledge about Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: Political Networks and Methodology

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes have a way of surprising even those who are supposed to know them well: when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Richard Nixon had just published a book in which he predicted that the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union would last “well into the next century” - a claim that likely would have been endorsed by the vast majority of specialists on the Soviet Union in the 1980s (Cox 2008: 13). While predicting revolutions like those during the Arab Spring or divining the political future in general is always a hard task, authoritarian regimes make it difficult to discern even their true present state, in particular when it comes to their internal elite politics.
In this paper, I develop a network-based framework for how we generate knowledge about authoritarian regimes – or any political bodies where information about the internal decision-making process is revealed almost exclusively through informal channels and leaks. I point out possible weaknesses in this process, and mechanisms through which biases might get introduced. I illustrate parts of this framework through results from pilot studies, leaving extensive empirical testing to dedicated future research projects.
I argue that there are three essential stages of this knowledge generation process, in all of which social networks play a crucial role: information release, interpretation, and dissemination to the target audience (foreign governments, the public or the academic community).
In the first stage, elite alliance and enmities networks play an important role in what information emerges from such closed regimes. Different actors within the regime will strategically leak or publicly reveal information to further their and their allies’ goals and hurt their enemies. They leak to their connections outside or in the press. If certain parts of the government are less likely to communicate (publicly or privately) to outside sources – such as is often the case with security forces – then the field may lack important information to correctly asses the whole of the authoritarian regime and its politics. I illustrate this first stage by examining how journalists reporting on the Trump White House portray actors and events differently depending on who their inside sources appear to be. I use the Trump White House in this case (and not the Chinese government used in the stages below) because it allows me to construct a reasonable “ground truth” of the elite network and ties to journalists based on statements made under oath and other information revealed retroactively in credible public records.
In the second stage, the information released is interpreted by experts on that particular regime. These individuals are thought to have the contextual, cultural, and language knowledge for a correct interpretation. But given the dearth of information often available, they likely also rely heavily on each other in that interpretation, opening up the possibility of echo chambers and group think. I illustrate this process by reporting on the results of an information diffusion analysis using data from over 400 Twitter/X accounts run by experts on Chinese contemporary politics.
Finally, experts communicate their factual findings and possible predictions based thereon to their audience. But they are not the only ones vying for attention and influence: in particular the regime itself has an interest in convincing the audience of its own interpretation. I illustrate this struggle by comparing the framing of specific political events on Twitter/X by experts to that of Chinese government accounts, and analyzing the reception thereof in the mainstream media.
This paper contributes to the discussion in the “the hottest subfield” of comparative politics (Art 2012) by providing a theoretical framework to think about weaknesses and blind spots in the research of authoritarian regimes that go beyond those introduced by the research methods employed (Ahram & Goode 2016, Art 2016). It speaks in a similar manner to studies of specific (authoritarian) countries and regions at a time when many such regimes become more difficult to access – as in the case of the P.R. of China or the Russian Federation, for example.
References:
Ahram, A. I., & Goode, J. P. (2016). Researching authoritarianism in the discipline of democracy. Social Science Quarterly, 97(4), 834-849.
Art, D. (2016). Archivists and adventurers: Research strategies for authoritarian regimes of the past and present. Social Science Quarterly, 97(4), 974-990.
Art, D. (2012). What do we know about authoritarianism after ten years?. Comparative Politics, 44(3), 351-373.
Cox, M. (2008). 1989 and why we got it wrong. (Working Paper Series of the Research Network 1989, 1). Berlin. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-16282

Author

• Franziska Barbara Keller, University of Bern