Surveillance Technology and Political Mobilization in Hybrid Regimes: Evidence from Serbia

As surveillance technologies proliferate globally and democratic backsliding accelerates, understanding how state monitoring affects political participation becomes increasingly urgent. Thus far, our knowledge on the effects of digital repression center on empirical cases with high repressive capabilities, like China, or high political violence, like Syria and Iran. This paper examines whether and how different forms of surveillance create "chilling effects" that deter political expression and mobilization in hybrid regimes with little political violence. Study 1 is a 2×2 factorial survey experiment conducted in Serbia, an electoral autocracy with documented surveillance expansion and active protest movements, where I test how exposure to different surveillance scenarios affects willingness to engage in (contentious) political activities. The experimental design manipulates both surveillance targeting (mass versus targeted) and modality (physical versus digital), allowing me to isolate the effects of each dimension. I hypothesize that targeted surveillance creates stronger chilling effects than diffuse surveillance, and also explore heterogeneous treatment effects across different social groups, like minorities and prior activists. Complementing the experimental evidence, Study 2 employs natural language processing to analyze whether observable chilling effects emerge in text data. This research contributes to our understanding of how authoritarian innovations in surveillance technology reshape the landscape of contentious politics in not-yet closed autocracies with little political violence.