Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China

Dimitrov will dedicate his time in the spring of 2012 to his book project Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China, which focuses on the puzzling longevity of communist single-party regimes. Political scientists have argued that autocratic regimes that lack adequate information about popular preferences will be short-lived and unstable. But communist regimes are on average very resilient. Based on archival evidence from China and Eastern Europe, Dimitrov explores how communist regimes manage the problem of information scarcity by creating institutions for collecting information that is provided either involuntarily or voluntarily. The involuntary collection of information is executed primarily through the intelligence network of the secret police and allows the regime to track the level of political dissent in society. The voluntary provision of information takes place through citizen complaints and denunciations and is useful for assessing popular preferences about redistribution. He argues that regime resilience is a delicate balancing act that is predicated on the smooth operation of the two systems for collecting information. When one system malfunctions (as happened in the second half of the 1980s in China, when the voluntary provision of information declined prior to the Tiananmen events), regime resilience is endangered. When both systems malfunction (as happened in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 1980s), regime collapse is likely.