Martin Dimitrov
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor of Political Science, Tulane University, Louisiana

Axel Springer Fellow - Class of Spring 2012

Martin Dimitrov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. He is the author of Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge, 2009) and is working on two book projects: a monograph entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and an edited volume entitled Why Communism Didn’t Collapse: Institutional Foundations of Authoritarian Resilience in Europe and Asia. He received his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2004, and was previously an Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has been awarded residential fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Hoover Institution (declined); the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame; the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford; the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard; and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard.

Project Description

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

Dimitrov dedicated 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.

Academy Activities

21 Jun 15
Authoritarianism in a Global Context Social Sciences

Berlin Retreat

Authoritarianism in a Global Context

Despite the impressive gains made by democracy in the last several decades, more than half of the world’s population still lives in autocracies today. A few years ago, Freedom House called attention to an important trend: the global retreat of democracy, which was expressed as a net decline in the number of polities classified as “free.”

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