I want to thank Lucan Way for producing such a thoughtful review of my book Dictatorship and Information. I will use this opportunity to clarify one issue that is raised in the review. Way notes that my theory of information privileges the masses, but authoritarian regimes typically collapse due to the actions of elites. Thus, a theory of information in autocracies needs to account for elites.
I do, of course, agree that the collection of information both about the masses and about the elites matters for authoritarian stability. This is why I discuss the monitoring of elites in chapters 1–4, 7, and 9. I also show, in contrast to dominant understandings, that regime incumbents in Eastern Europe had information about elite splits and the preparations for palace coups in 1989 (pp. 275–86, 396–403). There is, however, a fundamental difference in the difficulty of monitoring the masses and the elites. As I demonstrate in my book, because elites are numerically small and highly visible, they do not present logistical challenges for information collectors that are commensurate with those created by attempts to monitor the masses. There is probably no better illustration for this argument than the fact that although Chinese information gatherers had precious little knowledge about the mood of the masses in Tibet during the 1950s, the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan elites were well penetrated (pp. 152–53). Empirically, the book shows that monitoring elites is feasible even when information-collection capacity is limited.
Yet the main reason for paying attention to the masses is theoretical. In my theory, elites are especially consequential at the moment of regime establishment and at the time of regime collapse, as is documented in the relevant chapters. Undoubtedly, they do matter. But, as I show especially in chapters 7 and 9, elites act in full knowledge of trends in popular discontent that have been made available to them through the information-collection infrastructure. In other words, the elite splits that precede democratization in communist regimes become possible only as a consequence of rational calculations by the anti-incumbent faction within the elite. These calculations are driven by the available information on popular discontent. Therefore, theories that focus only on elites and exclude the masses will generate an incomplete understanding of what motivates elites to act.
As I show in my book, one subset of autocracies—single-party communist regimes—prove unusually adept at monitoring the masses and at achieving the longest average durability among nondemocracies. As I demonstrate in chapter 9, noncommunist regimes are significantly less capable of ensuring mass monitoring (pp. 414–35); they also have, not coincidentally, substantially shorter lifespans than communist regimes (p. 8). This allows me to highlight one of the main contributions of my theory of information. What varies across autocracies is not their capacity to monitor elites (all nondemocratic polities do that) but their success in the much more complicated task of creating institutions for assessing mass dissatisfaction. This is, fundamentally, what explains the variation in the longevity of authoritarian regimes.
