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By Root 1891 0

tells us more about Western biases than it does about modern authoritarian regimes. The persistence of modern authoritarianism can be explained by a whole variety of factors—energy endowment, little or no previous experience with democratic forms of rule, covert support from immoral Western democracies, bad neighbors—but an uninformed citizenry that cries out to be liberated by an electronic bombing of factoids and punchy tweets is typically not one of them. Most citizens of modern-day Russia or China do not go to bed reading Darkness at Noon only to wake up to the jingle of Voice of America or Radio Free Europe; chances are that much like their Western counterparts, they, too, wake up to the same annoying Lady Gaga song blasting from their iPhones. While they might have a strong preference for democracy, many of them take it to mean orderly justice rather than the presence of free elections and other institutions that are commonly associated with the Western model of liberal democracy. For many of them, being able to vote is not as valuable as being able to receive education or medical care without having to bribe a dozen greedy officials. Furthermore, citizens of authoritarian states do not necessarily perceive their undemocratically installed governments to be illegitimate, for legitimacy can be derived from things other than elections; jingoist nationalism (China), fear of a foreign invasion (Iran), fast rates of economic development (Russia), low corruption (Belarus), and efficiency of government services (Singapore) have all been successfully co-opted for these purposes.

Thus, to understand the impact of the Internet on authoritarianism, one needs to look beyond the Web’s obvious uses by opponents of the government and study how it has affected legitimacy-boosting aspects of modern authoritarian rule as well. Take a closer look at the blogospheres in almost any authoritarian regime, and you are likely to discover that they are teeming with nationalism and xenophobia, sometimes so poisonous that official government policy looks cosmopolitan in comparison. What impact such radicalization of nationalist opinion would have on the governments’ legitimacy is hard to predict, but things don’t look particularly bright for the kind of flawless democratization that some expect from the Internet’s arrival. Likewise, bloggers uncovering and publicizing corruption in local governments could be—and are—easily co-opted by higher-ranking politicians and made part of the anti-corruption campaign. The overall impact on the strength of the regime in this case is hard to determine; the bloggers may be diminishing the power of local authorities but boosting the power of the federal government. Without first developing a clear understanding of how power is distributed between the center and the periphery and how changes in this distribution affect the process of democratization, it is hard to predict what role the Internet might play.

Or look at how Wikis and social networking sites, not to mention various government online initiatives, are improving the performance of both governments and businesses they patronize. Today’s authoritarian leaders, obsessed with plans to modernize their economies, spew out more buzzwords per sentence than an average editorial in Harvard Business Review (Vladislav Surkov, one of the Kremlin’s leading ideologues and the godfather of Russia’s Silicon Valley, has recently confessed that he is fascinated by “crowdsourcing”). Authoritarian regimes in Central Asia, for example, have been actively promoting a host of e-government initiatives. But the reason why they pursue such modernization is not because they want to shorten the distance between the citizen and the bureaucrat but because they see it as a way to attract funds from foreign donors (the likes of IMF and the World Bank) while also removing the unnecessary red-tape barriers to economic growth.

Dress Your Own Windows

Authoritarian survival increasingly involves power sharing and institution building, two processes that many political scientists