Suchergebnisse

Conventional wisdom expects to see a rise in cyber activities around aggressive foreign policy events. In this article, I test this claim by investigating whether sanctions lead to an increase in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks using new data on DoS attacks measured from Internet traffic. Exploring the development of DoS attacks around sanctions imposed against Russia in 2014 indeed shows an increase of DoS attacks against several sanction sender states. Extending this case study to a systematic analysis, including all sanction threats and impositions made by the United States and the European Union between 2008 and 2016, shows no apparent patterns. When I exclusively consider sanctions against technologically advanced countries, however, the frequency of attacks rises systematically against the United States. It thus appears that states do not always have to expect a digital retaliation after aggressive foreign policies. Nevertheless, sanctioning countries may have to anticipate an increase in DoS attacks when their governments impose sanctions against technologically advanced countries.

AbstractTo what degree are news websites in autocracies resilient to online censorship? I explore this question in Egypt, which has begun to heavily censor news websites in recent years, alongside several other autocracies. Relying on a sample of 145 news outlets, I systematically explore how blocking affects traffic on outlets and their current statuses. Statistical tests show that blocked Egyptian outlets lost on average 54–55 per cent of their global traffic and are more likely to halt their activity. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the loss in traffic was particularly strong for independent, Islamist opposition and larger outlets, and that permanently blocked websites were substantially more likely to halt services. These results support previous work on state repression and information control showing that censorship often works in reducing the consumption and provision of alternative political information.

AbstractMost authoritarian countries censor the press. As a response, many opposition and independent news outlets have found refuge on the Internet. Despite the global character of the Internet, news outlets are vulnerable to censorship in cyberspace. This study investigates Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on news websites in Venezuela and details how news reporting is related to DoS attacks in an attempt to censor content. For this empirical test, I monitored 19 Venezuelan news websites from November 2017 until June 2018 and continuously retrieved their content and status codes to infer DoS attacks. Statistical analyses show that news content correlates to DoS attacks. In the Venezuelan context, these news topics appear to be not only on protest and repression but also on opposition actors or other topics that question the legitimacy of the regime. By establishing these relationships, this study deepens our understanding of how modern technologies are used as censorship tools.

Abstract
Conventional wisdom expects to see a rise in cyber activities around aggressive foreign policy events. In this article, I test this claim by investigating whether sanctions lead to an increase in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks using new data on DoS attacks measured from Internet traffic. Exploring the development of DoS attacks around sanctions imposed against Russia in 2014 indeed shows an increase of DoS attacks against several sanction sender states. Extending this case study to a systematic analysis, including all sanction threats and impositions made by the United States and the European Union between 2008 and 2016, shows no apparent patterns. When I exclusively consider sanctions against technologically advanced countries, however, the frequency of attacks rises systematically against the United States. It thus appears that states do not always have to expect a digital retaliation after aggressive foreign policies. Nevertheless, sanctioning countries may have to anticipate an increase in DoS attacks when their governments impose sanctions against technologically advanced countries.

Propaganda plays a key role in maintaining power in authoritarian regimes. Previous research finds that overt, crude, and heavy-handed messaging, so-called hard propaganda, can be used to effectively convey government strength and deter citizens from joining anti-regime protests in relatively stable autocratic regimes like China. Yet, it is unclear if this is also true in more contested and unstable autocratic contexts. In these settings, citizens are more likely to question such messaging and prior beliefs of government strength vary more widely. We explore the perception of hard propaganda in one such difficult test case for hard propaganda: the crisis-ridden Maduro regime in Venezuela. We measure perceptions of hard propaganda among the public using an online survey that featured a choice experiment in which respondents chose between and rated different propaganda images against more neutral political communication. Our results show that respondents perceived hard propaganda images as stronger compared to neutral political communication. This holds true – contrary to our pre-registered expectations – regardless of whether respondents overall perceived the government as strong or weak. Moreover, respondents reported a lower willingness to join anti-government protests but, at the same time, had a greater motivation to challenge the regime. These results support and extend prior findings on the effectiveness of hard propaganda in deterring anti-regime activities to the case of contested and unstable autocracies. But they also suggest that this kind of messaging erodes regime legitimacy providing the first evidence outside of the Chinese case of the pathology of hard propaganda.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is an attack on democracy, human rights, and the international order. While European democracies have supported their war-torn partner, Russia has sought to undermine public support by stopping its gas supply and imposing economic costs on European citizens. In consequence, Europeans find themselves caught between economic self-interest and principles. We present a theoretical argument and test how corresponding arguments for and against continued backing of Ukraine affect citizens' support using experimental and observational data collected while concerns with gas shortage and inflation mounted in Germany and Denmark. We find that support for Ukraine does not falter due to economic concerns. In contrast, citizens become more supportive when presented with arguments related to human rights, democracy, and respect for territorial boundaries. We discuss implications for understanding citizens' responses to autocratic power strategies and how support likely depends on the type of partner and domestic elite rhetoric.

We introduce a global dataset on education policies and systems across modern history (EPSM), which includes measures on compulsory education, ideological guidance and content of education, governmental intervention and level of education centralization, and teacher training. EPSM covers 157 countries with populations exceeding 1 million people, and time series extend from 1789 to the present. The new dataset opens up for studying several questions concerning political control and the politicized nature of education systems. In addition to describing the measures, we detail how the data were collected and discuss validity and reliability issues. Thereafter, we describe historical trends in various education system characteristics. Finally, we illustrate how our data can be used to address key questions about education and politics, replicating and extending recent analyses on the (reciprocal) relationship between education and democratization, the impact of education on political attitudes, and how rural inequality interacts with regime type in influencing education systems.

In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a particular form of cyberattack that disables web services by flooding them with high levels of data traffic. We argue that websites in nondemocratic regimes should be especially prone to this type of attack, particularly around political focal points such as elections. This is due to two mechanisms: governments employ DoS attacks to censor regime-threatening information, while at the same time, activists use DoS attacks as a tool to publicly undermine the government's authority. We analyze these mechanisms by relying on measurements of DoS attacks based on large-scale Internet traffic data. Our results show that in authoritarian countries, elections indeed increase the number of DoS attacks. However, these attacks do not seem to be directed primarily against the country itself but rather against other states that serve as hosts for news websites from this country.