Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Information Age

Abstract

The outbreak of the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa reignited the debate over the possibilities of democratization, with much attention paid to the roles of the internet. This paper attempts to answer the questions of whether the expansion of the internet leads to democratization and how calls for democratization during the Arab Spring produced contrasting results in Tunisia and China. The time-series cross-sectional analysis based on data of 166 countries suggests that the annual change of internet penetration is positively associated with a country’s Polity score and that the existing level of the penetration has a slightly negative effect on democratization, though the inclusion of the internet does not visibly improve the explanatory power of the models. The case study comparing Tunisia and China closely examines the multifaceted relationship between the internet and democratization and shows that the internet alone cannot determine the direction of political change. Rather, it is spatially and temporally situated state and societal actors who collectively determine the process and outcome of politics.