Factors that influence a country to exercise its capacity for digital repression

Abstract

Countries with greater digital repression capacity are more likely to engage in digital repression. Yet, this relationship is substantially weakened in the presence of strong privacy protection and high political stability, but is not significantly affected by election timing. Drawing on a panel dataset of 172 countries from 2003–2022 (N = 3440), this study examines the conditions under which states exercise their digital repression capacity. While prior research assumes that digital repression follows capacity, we argue that institutional and political environments shape whether capacity is translated into actual repression. Using fixed effects modeling, we find that repression capacity is a strong predictor of digital repression, but this relationship is significantly weakened in environments where strong privacy protections and political stability exist. Contrary to expectations, states’ digital repression does not increase during election years. These findings suggest that digital repression is not simply a function of technical capacity, but also by institutional, legal, and political environments. The results challenge the assumption that digital repression is primarily a tool of autocratic regimes, revealing instead that it also occurs in democracies under bureaucratic and legal justifications.