Big Data Transformation - Does Regime Type Matter?

Abstract

Ongoing technological advancements are enabling the generation of Big Data – i.e. the gathering and processing of large amounts of information – at an increasingly exponential rate. This has triggered discussions of threats and opportunities in various technical, academic, and policy-making fields. But while Big Data and the technological advancements underlying it have received considerable scholarly attention in political science, only a few works compare their impact on, and in, different regime types: Does the increasing ability to gather and analyze information create similar threats and chances in different regime types, or do chances and threats differ according to the type of political regime? And how does Big Data – the availability of large amounts of information – affect ruling dynamics in and strategies of different political regimes (among others: legitimacy, cooptation, repression, participation)? Whereas these broad inquiries can trigger the widest range of research themes and designs, we would like to invite works that discuss the relevance of their findings for the comparative study of Big Data in different regime types. Our panel initially includes three papers that compare online privacy regulation in democracies and dictatorships, explore the use of Big Data in autocratization and authoritarian hardening processes, and a comparative investigation of Big Data use during public health crises in the EU, Asia, and Latin America. By bringing these works together, our panel aims to serve as a first step in transcending we see as a weakness in the current literature: its division between works that pursue the broad question above exclusively in authoritarian regimes, and those that focus only on democracies. This comparative focus enables us to also invite a wide range of further thematic foci as well as works that focus on either Big Data or the technological tools used to generate it.

Title	Details
Internet privacy laws: Does Regime Type Matter?	View Paper Details
The use of big data in the process of hardening autocracy	View Paper Details
Corona-apps in international comparison – insights from the EU, Asia and Latin America	View Paper Details