This paper studies the consequences of digital surveillance in dictatorships. I first develop an informational theory of repression and co-optation. I argue that digital surveillance resolves dictators’ information problem of not knowing individual citizens’ true anti-regime sentiments. By identifying radical opponents, digital surveillance enables dictators to substitute targeted repression for non-exclusive co-optation to forestall coordinated uprisings. My theory implies that as digital surveillance technologies advance, we should observe a rise in targeted repression and a decline in universal redistribution. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits temporal variation in digital surveillance systems among Chinese counties, I find that surveillance increases local governments’ public security expenditure and arrests of political activists but decreases public goods provision. My theory and evidence suggest that improvements in governments’ information make citizens worse off in dictatorships.

This article uses new data measuring gradations of personalism in authoritarian regimes to evaluate the relationship between concentration of power and patterns of repression. It shows that the personalization of power in dictatorships leads to an increase in repression. Given the rise in personalism we are witnessing globally, the findings of this study imply that repression is likely to become more prevalent in dictatorships as a consequence.

This paper presents evidence that autocratic culture adversely affects social trust and political participation. We find that individuals whose ancestors migrated from countries with higher autocracy levels are less likely to trust others and to vote in presidential elections in the U.S. The impact of autocratic culture on trust can last for at least three generations while the impact on voting disappears after one generation. These impacts on trust and voting are also significant across Europe. We further access the robustness of our findings concerning selection into migration and other confounders such as home countries’ economic conditions, human capital stocks, and the strength of family ties.

Chinese local leaders’ behaviors are driven by a career incentive structure in which those delivering better performances are more likely to be promoted. Local leaders signal competence when their superiors actively collect evidence to evaluate their performances: these are years leading to the end of a five-year term. To create better economic performances, local leaders lessen the enforcement of environmental regulations to reduce local industries’ production costs and/or to attract firms from other jurisdictions. Such selective enforcement creates an environmental political business cycle in which pollution increases in years leading to the year of leader turnover. The empirical analysis on a panel of Chinese prefectures of 2002-2010 reveals a U-shaped relationship between a prefecture’s party secretary’s years in office and its average annual PM2.5 level.

Countries all around the world take serious measures to crack down on corruption in the hope that reducing corruption would promote economic growth. This paper investigates the negative consequences of anti-corruption measures on economic outcomes. By exploiting an unexpected corruption crackdown in Northeast China in 2004, we find that the crackdown significantly lowers firm productivity and reduces firm entry. The negative impacts are mainly borne by private and foreign firms while the state-owned firms are intact. We further find that private firms with personal connections to the government fare worse than the state-owned firms, while unconnected private firms do not perform differently from the state-owned firms after the crackdown. Our findings suggest that cracking down on corruption may weaken some connected private firms’ political ties and remove the “grease of the wheels” that supports firm development in weak market institutions.

Conventional wisdom holds that in non-democracies, a strong central state can reward and punish local administrations through a merit-based promotion system, which should restrain corruption. But much evidence shows that rampant corruption coexists with powerful central governments. This study resolves this puzzle by incorporating bribes in a tournament model. Our model predicts that when bribes are more important than performance in superiors’ total gain, or if there is a lack of serious punishments for wrong-doing, or an increase in promotion gain, promotion can incentivize corruption. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design exploiting exogenous variations in officials’ likelihood of promotion from a mandatory age cutoff for bureaucratic promotion in China, combined with a unique biographical database of prefecture party secretaries and novel measures of corruption, we find that promotions encourage corruption in China. Moreover, prefecture party secretaries are more corrupt if their provincial superiors are connected to central factions, suggesting that upper-level factionalism is one of the disincentives that breaks down lower-level meritocracy.

This paper examines the social costs of digital surveillance versus in-person surveillance. I argue that both types of surveillance deter civic participation because citizens fear targeted repression. However, digital surveillance does not entail human-agent intrusion into private lives, and therefore is less likely to lower interpersonal trust and regime legitimacy. I find consistent evidence using a survey experiment with over 500 students in two universities in North and West China. The external validity of the experimental findings is established using the Chinese General Social Survey and an interrupted time-series design that exploits an exogenous shock to the intensity of digital surveillance and repression caused by the 2015 Tianjin Explosions in China.