Surveillance of Repression: Theory and Implementation

This paper supersedes our working papers, “Measuring the Tolerance of the State” and “Real-time Surveillance of Repression.” We acknowledge funding from the Data Science Initiative, the Population Studies and Training Center, the Eastman Professorship, and the JP Morgan Chase Research Assistant Program at Brown University; and the Kenneth C. Griffin Economics Research Funds at Harvard University. We are grateful to the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names for sharing their database of country names and official languages with us in a convenient form, to the Global Sanctions Database for answering our questions, to Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Yao Li for sharing data on protests, and to Audrey Sacks for sharing data on commodities. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding or data sources. We thank Tariq Ahmad, Isaiah Andrews, Chris Blattman, Dan Björkegren, Ray Fair, Ben Feigenberg, Fred Finan, Terry Fletcher, Bård Harstad, Lihua Lei, David I. Levine, Eduardo Montero, David Yang, audiences at Brown University, Georgetown University, Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), Harvard University, ETH Zurich, the Cowles Foundation, SSE/SITE, Stockholm University, the NBER, UNC Chapel Hill, NYU, the GLPET, the AEA, the University of Chicago, the University of Miami, the Wallis Institute Annual Conference, the Autocracies and Conflict Conference, the Northeastern Universities Development Consortium, the Kelley School of Business, Stanford University, and especially discussants Brian Knight, Jorge Lemus, and Scott Gehlbach for comments and suggestions. We thank our many dedicated research assistants for their contributions to this project. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• June 16, 2022
• September 11, 2023
• December 17, 2024