Surveillance, Constriction, Exclusion: Digital Authoritarianism Through Financial Infrastructure

As financial systems digitize globally, the infrastructure through which citizens transact is becoming subject to new capacities for surveillance, constriction, and exclusion that remain unexamined as a form of digital authoritarianism (DA). Literature in the DA field has focused on information and communication technologies, examining online censorship, digital surveillance, disinformation, and repressive laws, while overlooking the financial infrastructure through which states can monitor, constrain, and deny citizens' financial participation. This paper introduces Digital Financial Authoritarianism (DFA): a domain of DA operating through financial infrastructure. DFA describes conditions under which financial privacy is eroded, exclusion from financial participation is enabled, and authoritarian control over transactions becomes feasible, whether by design or as an unintended consequence of individually reasonable policies. I develop a three-mechanism framework, identifying surveillance, constriction, and exclusion as the capacities through which DFA operates, and examine their most prominent current manifestations: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), regulatory restrictions on privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, and political debanking. Drawing on Pearson's (2024) promotion-based definition and Roberts and Oosterom's (2025) five-element analytical framework, I demonstrate that the analytical tools developed for DA apply to the financial domain. Illustrations drawn from democratic and authoritarian contexts, including the EU, Switzerland, China, El Salvador, Canada, and the United Kingdom, show that DFA results from policy and institutional choice rather than regime type. The paper concludes by outlining how the framework can be operationalized for systematic cross-national comparison through fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), extending Daminov's (2025) set-theoretic approach to digital repression into the financial domain. A composite outcome combining retail CBDC pursuit with cryptocurrency restriction is proposed, alongside six macro-political conditions, including regime type, political repression, digital infrastructural capacity, state digital monitoring capacity, financial repression, and rational-legal legitimation, that may configure the pathways to DFA's presence or absence.