International linkages and the use of digital and non-digital repression in autocracies

With the rise of global economic and political dependencies, autocratic regimes opened up to the international community to remain competitive on the global market, to improve living standards, and to gain long-term prosperity. While the autocrat benefits largely from such alliances, the potential to act aggressively towards political opponents within the country becomes limited. The violent dispersion of protest might topple the country's stability, scare off investors and deter further diplomatic relations. As an alternative, trending towards digital constraints holds some advantages over physical repression. Online repression is a suitable tool to cut off communication flows and collective action potential virtually, while avoiding economic fallout and condemnation by the international community. In the analysis, I combine event data on protests with fine-grained data on online censorship and Internet outages to estimate the effect of international linkages on the use of digital and non-digital repressive tools as a response to domestic dissent. Results demonstrate that political alliances lead to an increase in digital repression, especially content filtering.