Digital Authoritarianism: ICT-enabled Repression Across Regime Types

Digital authoritarianism uses Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to sustain autocratic stability through surveillance, censorship, cyberattacks and social manipulation. While this phenomenon is central to modern autocracies, the borderless nature of cyberspace has enabled democratically elected states to adopt similar practices under certain conditions. Drawing on data from the Digital Society Project (DSP) and cross-national time-series analysis on the Digital Repression Index (DRI), this study reveals significant differences in the digital authoritarian toolkit across regime types. Closed regimes predominantly utilize tactics such as surveillance, social manipulation, and internet shutdowns, whereas democracies, despite possessing greater digital repression capacities, generally exercise restraint. However, when governed by illiberal leaders, democracies exhibit patterns of digital repression similar to their autocratic counterparts, challenging assumptions about the normative divide between regime types.