Internet Service Provision under Authoritarian Rule: A Field Experiment in Belarus

Abstract

Do authoritarian regimes strategically limit the opposition’s Internet access? By constricting Internet access to potential challengers, governments can reduce the need to censor (since anti-regime content would be less likely to be produced and read) and also the need for large infrastructure shutdowns (which may harm the government). Cross-national work shows that political exclusion is associated with significantly lower rates of connectivity for the affected groups, but cannot tell us whether this pattern is because governments strategically limiting Internet access of the political opposition. We test this mechanism with a field experiment in Belarus. We email support centers of the national telecommunications provider and vary partisan cues in our emails. In linewith the strategic exclusion mechanism, we find a tendency that opposition support leads to lower response rates for Internet-related service requests. Due to the low responserate, however, our findings largely fail to reach conventional levels of significance.