Abstract:Social media have caused adaptations to existing conceptualizations of democratization, democratic backsliding, and authoritarian hardening. One attempt to capture how social media may solidify authoritarian tendencies while maintaining the government’s popularity is the concept of informational autocracies: rule primarily through the manipulation of information. In this paper, we contribute to Guriev and Treisman’s conceptualizations, who coined the term “informational autocrats” and relied on case studies fr… Show more
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