Семинар "Политическая экономика": Xu Xu (Princeton University) о социальных издержках цифрового наблюдения.

На семинаре "Политическая экономика" Xu Xu (Princeton University) рассказал о том, что цифровая слежка сдерживает политическое участие без некоторых дорогостоящих побочных продуктов личной слежки.

Тема: The Social Costs of Digital vs. In-Person Surveillance

Аннотация:

The world is witnessing an explosion of digital surveillance in recent years. This paper examines the social costs of digital surveillance versus in-person surveillance in dictatorships. I argue that both types of surveillance deter political participation because citizens fear targeted repression. However, digital surveillance does not entail human-agent intrusion into private lives and therefore is less likely to undermine interpersonal trust and regime legitimacy than in-person surveillance. I manipulate information about surveillance operations in an in-the-field survey experiment on college students in two regions of China and find supportive evidence. I further establish the external validity of the experimental findings on digital surveillance using a nationally representative survey and a natural experiment caused by the 2015 Tianjin explosion. Overall, the findings that digital surveillance deters political participation without some of the costly byproducts of in-person surveillance have board implications for surveillance in dictatorships and even in democracies.