The Electronic Face of Authoritarianism: Comparing E-Government as a Tool for Gaining Legitimacy in Competitive and Non-Competitive Regimes

This paper examines e-government in autocracies as a new and seemingly democratic pattern of legitimation which became increasingly popular during the last decade – both in competitive and non-competitive authoritarian regimes. The most recent data of the UN e-government survey show that several autocracies massively expanded their online facilities. Indeed, some regimes seem to outperform democratic countries in relation to their e-participation index: Kazakhstan, for example, ranks already higher than Germany, Austria or Sweden and Uzbekistan is ahead of Switzerland (UNPACS 2014). Recent studies engage with the particularities of e-government in autocracies and question the widespread assumptions in the literature on the political impact of information technologies that such initiatives improve transparency and have positive effects on the quality of government (Åström et al. 2012, Linde and Karlsson 2013, Stier 2015). However, the question of why and how e-government is used to legitimate authoritarianism has not been sufficiently addressed yet. Furthermore, this new strand of literature does not account for variations of e-government across the different types of authoritarian regimes. It is the aim of this paper to shed light on e-government structures in competitive and non-competitive regimes. The comparative case study applies techniques of quantitative and qualitative text analysis and inquiries about the varying causal mechanisms and effects of using e-government in authoritarian settings. By looking into the cases of Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – the post-Soviet region displays one of the most significant growths in e-government during the last decade – this paper argues that due to increased internal legitimation pressures, the official websites in competitive regimes are primarily set up for a national audience whereas e-government in non-competitive regimes responds first and foremost to external legitimation pressures. Keywords: Authoritarianism, Competitive Regimes, Non-Competitive Regimes, Internal and External Legitimation, E-Government