AAARCC Lunch & Learn Series: Governing with fake data? Statistical misreporting in an autocracy

Dictators collect massive amounts of information, but does this information inform their decisions? Data-driven policy-making in autocracies is vulnerable to data manipulation by internal actors because government officials who have something to gain or lose from which decisions a dictator makes are also the people who collect and produce the data the dictator uses to make these decisions. Suspicion of data manipulation then drives dictators to eschew what information they have, making them govern as if they had no information. We explore this dynamic in single-party Vietnam using government data and satellite images.

Co-Sponsored by: Department of Political Science