Information Control in Autocracies: A Review Essay

In autocracies, control over information is crucial to the existential trade-offs that leaders face: managing threats from elites requires credible information about elite intentions and preferences; managing threats from below requires information about public preferences, grievances, and support. At the foundation of effective authoritarian governance and authoritarian survival is the autocrat’s ability to manage information flows both to and from the autocrat. Those who control which information individuals receive can potentially shape what individuals believe and when they engage or disengage with political life. 

In this working paper, Malika Talgatova, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego, offers a simple conceptual map that places “old” and “new” instruments of information control within the same frame, highlighting how strategies differ not only by whether they restrict or produce information, but also by whether they target overtly political content or ostensibly non-political domains that nonetheless shape social order and regime resilience. Talgatova synthesizes what is known about its effects across distinct targets: not only citizens as information consumers, but also journalists, activists, and other information providers who respond strategically to monitoring, sanctions, and shifting incentives. Third, she identifies points of convergence across fragmented literatures and draws out a research agenda centered on the fusion of hard and soft, visible and covert, and state and networked forms of control that define contemporary authoritarian information strategies.

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