Lucaccini, M. Geopolitical Dynamics of Digital Authoritarianism: Emerging Global Challenges, SOG Working Paper 6, Maggio 2024

This paper examines digital authoritarianism and the leverage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to maintain political control. The paper offers a theoretical framework of the digital authoritarian toolkit and arguesthat ICTsreinforce autocracies' tenets ofstability – repression,cooptation, and legitimation. In line with cyberspace’s borderless nature, the toolkit manifests through a set of practices and capabilities across regime types. Using cross-national, time-series data drawn from the Digital Society Project (DSP), I provide insights into the global patterns of digital authoritarianism. The research reveals variance among autocracies in selecting their digital authoritarian toolkit, with a bias towards surveillance and social manipulation. Autocracies tend to digitally repress beyond their inherent capabilities, resorting to lower-capacity strategies (e.g., Internet shutdowns) or relying on external service providers. Notably, democracies possess higher digital repression capabilities but refrain from using them; still, when ruled by illiberal leaders, they exhibit patterns akin to their autocratic counterparts.