Martin K. Dimitrov

What the Party Wanted to Know Citizen Complaints as a “Barometer of Public Opinion” in Communist Bulgaria

Authoritarian governments produce internal assessments of the quality of governance that allow them to identify and address brewing problems before they threaten regime stability. This paper provides a theory of how the information necessary to produce such assessments is collected. The empirical focus of the paper is on pre-1989 Bulgaria, which is used to illustrate how information-gathering channels in communist autocracies differ from those used in electoral autocracies. The theoretical argument of the paper is that citizen complaints rather than elections function as the main channel for gathering information on popular perceptions about governance problems in communist autocracies. Information compiled through the analysis of complaints is valued because it allows the leadership to identify problems with policy implementation, to track corruption, and to monitor the level of popular trust in the regime. Therefore, citizen complaints serve as a barometer of public opinion regarding governance problems. The archival materials on which this paper is based were accidentally discovered in the 2000s, when a closetful of about 2,000 files of the Information-Sociological Center of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party was located during routine repairs of the Central State Archive in Sofia. These files, which were previously assumed lost, give scholars access to a treasure trove of material that provides a rare internal perspective on governance under late socialism. In conjunction with other formerly classified archival materials, they allow us to document what information on public opinion was collected and transmitted to the top leadership in pre-1989 Bulgaria.

Tracking Public Opinion Under Authoritarianism

Can autocracies obtain accurate information on popular opinion? This article approaches this question by focusing on the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev period. Based on Soviet archival materials (primarily Fond 89, the Volkogonov papers, and the Rubinov collection), the article argues that the Soviet regime relied on three main channels to track popular preferences: the kgb, opinion polling, and the analysis of citizen complaint letters. Each of these channels provided a different type of information: the kgb tracked levels of political dissent; opinion polling assessed general levels of satisfaction with the regime; and citizen complaints produced detailed information on the redistributive preferences of the population. Individually, none of these channels provided sufficient information on public opinion. However, when taken as a whole, they supplied the leadership with surprisingly nuanced information on popular preferences.

State Security, Information, and Repression: A Comparison of Communist Bulgaria and Ba'thist Iraq

The centrality of a strong state security apparatus to the maintenance of authoritarian rule via the threat or use of repression has been highlighted in classic studies of single-party regimes as well as in more recent analyses of authoritarian resilience in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This article focuses on two other fundamental questions related to the operation of state security forces in single-party autocracies during the Cold War. First, how did the state security agencies of East Germany and Saddam Husseins Iraq collect information? Second, how was this information used? The article underscores the importance of the recruitment of informants for the state security apparatus, and it also reveals how information affects decisions about the deployment of repression. These single-party autocracies continuously extracted information by recruiting ordinary citizens to participate (voluntarily or involuntarily) as informants in the state security networks and used the information gathered to mete out repression.

The Social Contract Revisited: Evidence from Communist and State Capitalist Economies

Abstract The social contract thesis explained stability in communist autocracies as a consequence of an implicit exchange between the regime and the populace: citizens remained quiescent and the regime provided them with secure jobs, social services, subsidised housing, and consumer goods. Our essay asks how well the social contract thesis applies in three different types of regimes. We review classic literature on the socialist social contract in light of newly available archival evidence on the Soviet Union. We turn then to reform-era China and Putin’s Russia, finding that these post-socialist regimes create distinctive ‘market social contracts’. Our work shows that communist and authoritarian leaders cater to the consumption needs of populations in a strategic effort to remain in office and highlights the centrality of mass cooptation for explaining durable authoritarianism.

The Political Logic of Media Control in China

China has two separate types of media—public and internal— with different content that is aimed at two distinct audiences. Public media include print media (books and periodicals), broadcast media (film, radio, and television), and digital media (Internet andmobilemedia). Internalmedia occasionally feature books and documentaries, but consist primarily of limited-circulation periodicals that carry analytical and news reports. In contrast to the publicmedia,whose content is openly available, internal media circulate only to regime insiders, usually those holding various types of leadership positions. The rapidly burgeoning scholarship on the Chinese media has focused on the public media and has produced two closely related central insights about the political logic of media control: one is that censorship is more likely to affect content that can lead to collective action, and the other is that critical reporting that does not lead to collective action will be encouraged in order to alleviate information shortages. What deserves further scrutiny is the calculus that determines whether particular events have a collective action potential (and thus information about them should be censored) and what types of critical reporting can be allowed. To address this question, we need to examine the content and functions of the internal media in China. Analysis reveals that internal media content guides decisions about what information should be censored and what types of investigative reporting are permissible. Existing studies of the internal reporting system have not engaged with the issue of how the internal media can be used to shape the content of public media in China. This essay argues that the central function of the internal media in contemporary China is to provide time-sensitive information to the regime about popular discontent. The knowledge that is generated through the internal media system is then used to determine which events have collective action potential and should be subject to news censorship. The internal media also allow the power-holders to decide when information about such events should be released to the public in the form of investigative reports. Though infrequent, the strategic publication of such reports allows the authorities to present an image of responsiveness to popular concerns and to portray the media not as simple mouthpieces of the party but as organs of public opinion supervision. This essay, which also serves as an introduction to this special issue of Problems of Post-Communism on Chinese media, is organized as follows. The first section analyzes the functions of the internal media in China. The next clarifies how a focus on internal media allows us to see both censorship and investigative reporting in the public media in a new light. Finally, we discuss the six essays that are included in this special issue and highlight the contributions that each of them makes to our understanding of media control in China.

Structural preconditions for the rise of the rule of law in China

Abstract This essay advocates for adopting a disaggregated approach when evaluating the progress that non-democratic countries like China are making towards establishing the rule of law. An understanding that the rule of law may develop in some areas, though not in others, allows us to identify the structural underpinnings of a limited rule-of-law system. The essay adopts a procedural definition of the rule of law as rules-based governance and argues that the regularized enforcement of laws and regulations is the key precondition for its emergence. This study defines regularized enforcement as consistent, transparent, and procedurally fair enforcement and identifies the conditions under which such enforcement may emerge. Although bureaucracies with clear mandates can provide this type of enforcement, it is more likely to develop when courts of law arise as the main enforcers of laws and regulations. The theoretical argument about the issue-specific rule of law in China is illustrated through three case studies. The first is of government accountability, where progress towards the rule of law has been minimal. The second is of intellectual property rights, where regularized enforcement has unexpectedly developed, especially for patents and copyrights. The third area is environmental protection, which is explicitly following the model of intellectual property rights. The essay concludes by arguing that an issue-specific approach allows us to grasp more fully the variation in good governance and progress towards establishing the rule of law that exists on the ground in China.