Week 10: Authoritarian Repression at Scale

Guiding Questions

We look at historic and contemporary examples of how governments use large-scale data collections and analysis to surveil and repress groups of citizens: from population registries that helped the Nazis identify and persecute Jews to China’s system of online censorship. What makes such data systems so dangerous? How can researchers study a system that is designed to be opaque?

Required readings

• Seltzer, William and Anderson, Margo (2008). Using Population Data Systems to Target Vulnerable Population Subgroups and Individuals: Issues and Incidents. In Statistical Methods for Human Rights (pp. 273–328). New York: Asher, Janna and Banks, David and Scheuren, Fritz J.. [PDF on Moodle]
• King, Gary and Pan, Jennifer and Roberts, Margaret E. (2014). Reverse-Engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation. Science, 345(6199).

Further reading

• King, Gary and Pan, Jennifer and Roberts, Margaret E. (2013). How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression. American Political Science Review, 107(2), pp. 326–343.
• King, Gary and Pan, Jennifer and Roberts, Margaret E. (2017). How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument. American Political Science Review, 111(3), pp. 484–501.
• Aly, Götz and Roth, Karl Heinz (2004). The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in The Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [PDF on Moodle]
• Tirole, Jean (2021). Digital Dystopia. American Economic Review, 111(6), pp. 2007–48.

Suggested media

• China’s New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything, Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2016.