This raises the question whether the model of the spin dictator described by Guriev and Treisman can ever be stable. Sooner or later, perhaps, it must evolve into something either better or worse.
Previous chapters of this book showed that Secret Leviathan faced a secrecy/capacity tradeoff. The ruling party had two aims: to retain state power and to build the capacities of the state. More secrecy protected the regime. Beyond a point, more secrecy also eroded state capacity. Communist rulers gave the impression that they prized state capacity above everything. But the intense secrecy that they chose indicates that they actually prioritized self-protection, while the state they built was substantially less capable than it seemed from the outside.
The information-sharing revolution of the past twenty years has major implications for both state capacity and regime security. It is too early to provide a full account of these implications. For present purposes, two are especially salient. First, an implication for state capacity: new informationsharing technologies are expanding society’s production possibilities, especially in services of all kinds, including public services. Public health provides an example. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, before mass testing facilities were available, citizens of Britain and the United States could self-report sickness on a smartphone app. This enabled real-time monitoring of the likely spread of a novel disease.[500] Notably, it relied on the participants trusting the motivations of the project with regard to the uses of their personal data and the security with which their data would be handled. More generally, public health agencies could seek to manage the pandemic with unprecedented information capacity, but information sharing rested on a relationship of mutual openness and trust between agency staff and the citizens.
A second implication of falling costs of information sharing is the growing capacity of incumbent regimes to protect themselves by spreading disinformation through social networks. It has become easier for spin dictators to protect their hold on the state despite limited secrecy and partial censorship. They have learned to manage the information available to the mass of people by dominating the public sphere behind the scenes. They crowd out the facts by spreading a thousand rumors and fabrications. They crowd out independent sources of information by legal and extralegal harassment. In this way they maintain popular uncertainty about the true character of the regime, the true state of informed opinion, and the true opportunities and benefits of political action. The outcome is that civil society is disempowered.
Where do these changes leave the secrecy/capacity tradeoff? For democracies there is good news: the returns to open government should be increasing. As a result, elected governments should be able to achieve more (because information sharing increases state capacity) with less secrecy (because secrecy is a necessary evil, and because greater transparency also supports the citizens’ willingness to share information). This is illustrated in Figure 8.1. In the figure, the information revolution has pushed the secrecy/capacity frontier outward, not everywhere to the same degree, but more so where secrecy is less intense.
The good news comes with a warning, however. If trust in government is eroded or disrupted, a democratic society may not be able to reach the frontier. There is an interior trap, where low trust and polarized ideologies handicap state capacity and push the democratic state toward greater concealment.
For autocrats, the news is also mixed. They too can exploit gains from information sharing to the benefit of state capacity. But, as Figure 8.1 suggests, with the higher degrees of secrecy required to protect the dictator, the trust required for citizens to share their data freely with the state will be harder to achieve and the gains will be more limited.
At the same time, there are costs. The dictator no longer tries to find the resources for comprehensive censorship but instead must design and build a national firewall, employ internet monitors, and maintain troll farms. In the case of China, with approximately one billion internet users, figure 8.1. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff: Information sharing makes open government relatively more capable
Note: The solid curve shows the initial secrecy/capacity frontier. As previously described in Figure 2.3, S* is the degree of secrecy that delivers the maximum of state capacity at point X. Y is a point in the equilibrium zone for democracies and Z is the same for dictators.
In the next period, a new information-sharing technology raises the returns to open government. The dotted line shows the new frontier, which is raised by more, the less is secrecy (because the amount of increase depends on the transparency of government motivations and uses of personal data). The new maximum of state capacity, at X', is reached with more state capacity and less secrecy than at A. At all points the marginal gain from secrecy (to the left of X) is reduced or the marginal cost (to the right of X) is increased.
For democracies, state capacity is a good and secrecy is a necessary evil, so an upward shift of the frontier allows more state capacity to be combined with less secrecy (comparing Y' to Y). Given the same upward shift of the frontier, the autocrat, who values both state capacity and secrecy, might choose more state capacity and more secrecy (compared to Z). However, the price of secrecy to the autocrat has increased (the frontier declines more steeply to the right of X') so the autocrat’s best response is indeterminate; it might also be to allow secrecy to remain the same or decline, as shown in the figure at Z'.
state media reported in 2013 that more than two million citizens were employed to monitor social media.[501] This was around half of 1 percent of China’s urban working population at the time.[502] In addition, society must be maintained in a condition where most citizens are misinformed about how the world works, and the informed minority is expected to promote misinformation, even those that know better.
As in the past, Russians today are expected to attribute most historic evils to victimization by ill-intentioned outsiders, to trust in the present-day leaders as protectors of the nation, and to stigmatize all criticism as the work of foreign enemies and domestic traitors. Such stories help the leaders to hold on to state power, but they also make state power less usable. Xenophobia and a fear of diversity keep freethinkers and innovators out of public service. A career in government must be unattractive to those members of the informed elite who are morally averse to groupthink and disinformation. Talent is drained abroad, or it prefers obscurity to promotion. Thus, the state’s human capacity is likely to suffer. Moreover, even if informed leaders see reasons to engage constructively with the rest of the world where possible, it is hard to do so when public opinion is continually mobilized by fear and ultranationalism, roiled by myths and rumors that hinder sensible debate about the country’s long-run interest in the international arena.[503] As for learning capacity, such a state may have little capacity to recognize errors, let alone to correct them.
In short, modern dictators must continue to pay for their security by giving up a part of the effectiveness and capacities of the states that they build and over which they preside.
501
“China Employs Two Million Microblog Monitors State Media Say,” BBC Chinese Service, 4 October 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl-china-243969571.
502
The working population of China’s urban areas in 2013 was 382.4 million. “Statistical Communique of the People’s Republic of China on the 2013 National Economic and Social Development,” National Bureau of Statistics of China, 24 February 2014, http://www.stats.g0v.cn/english/PressRelease/201402/ t20140224_515103.html.
503
For discussion on these lines in relation to China, see Luttwak, Rise of China, 81-82,100-101.