Internet privacy laws: Does Regime Type Matter?

Digital technologies are allowing the gathering, storing, and processing of large amounts of data at increasing and unprecedented ways. This trend has triggered concerns of governments' unprecedented ability to acquire vast amounts of information on individuals and the consequences this has on privacy rights, democracy, and authoritarianism. Against this background, several works have discussed and analyzed the regulation of digital technologies – particularly regulations concerning privacy rights – in democracies. A parallel discussion of privacy regulations in authoritarian regimes, let alone a comparative study of privacy regulations in different regime types, remains largely missing. One reason for this gap is the lack of consensus among scholars of authoritarianism on the functions of laws and legislations in dictatorships. This raises competing expectations as to whether, or how, formal regulations in dictatorships may differ from those in democracies. In this paper, we test these competing hypotheses by analyzing panel data on formal online privacy regulations in democratic and authoritarian regimes between 2000 and 2021. Our findings show that while comparable shares of democracies and dictatorships enact online privacy regulation laws, the formal content of these laws is more protective in democracies. While seemingly unsurprising, our results challenge the view that authoritarian regimes imitate formal privacy regulations in democracies to generate international and domestic legitimacy. Surprisingly though, democracy (polyarchy), measured in degree, is associated with better online privacy protection law in authoritarian regimes but not in democracies. These findings suggest that both, regime type and proximity to the threshold of democracy in dictatorships, positively affect the content of online privacy protection laws. But once countries cross the threshold for democracy, the quality of democracy – the degree to which polyarchy exists – becomes irrelevant for the content of online privacy laws. They also support the view that some institutions in dictatorships might have a "proto democratic" effect when it comes to formal protection of rights. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of whether particular dimensions of democratic rule – as opposed to polyarchy – are relevant for the content of privacy regulation laws in democracies and discuss the relevance of our findings for the future comparative study of laws and legislatures in different regime types.