Does Internet Control Increase Support for Governments?

by Leah Liu

Internet is having a growing impact over politics. People complain and organize protest against governments online. Rival countries or political competitors discredit the ruling party by spreading rumors on social media. As a result, some governments set up national firewall and block websites that contain opinions against the ruling party. Countries with less Internet freedom argue that the control is necessary for social stability and national security. Monitoring information as a way to protect reputation and maintain popular support has long been practiced by political rulers. In the information age, however, does the approach still work? Even with the Great Firewall in China, people can still find ways to get around the walls and get information from the outside. Some of them use softwares built by companies or individuals promoting Internet freedom and with a single click, they are out in the free world.

This led me to think—wouldn’t controlling the Internet backfire for the governments? Since it is very difficult to completely isolate a country’s network from the outside, at least some people within the country will have access to denouncing opinions of their own government. Blocking those voices shows the government’s lack of confidence in itself as well as in its people. Wouldn’t people in return have less faith in their government? Or do they still genuinely support their leaders because the majority of the country are not exposed to unfavorable information of the government? To find out the answer, I conducted the research and evaluated the effect of Internet freedom on public opinion towards their governments by comparing data of 42 countries in the world. The findings could give us better insight of the rationality behind government censorship over the Internet and possible policy implications.

To measure the public opinion of the governments, I pulled the 2014 “Confidence in National Government” data from the World Poll Survey of Gallup Analytics. The company did the annual survey in over a hundred countries. For the scores of “Confidence in National Government”, they measure the percentage of respondents with a positive answer to the question “In this country, do you have confidence in the national government?” and make a ranking of all surveyed countries. For the level of Internet freedom, I used the Freedom On the Net scores from Freedom House. They rated 65 countries in 2014 through the examination of three categories: governmental efforts to block certain technologies; governmental efforts to limit certain contents; legal protection on Internet users’ rights. Higher score means greater restriction over the Internet. Freedom House has so far the most comprehensive data on Internet freedom, but the total number of the countries they surveyed was not ideal for a quantitative research. Also, cross-referencing to “Confidence in National Government” data eliminated some choices in countries, thus the 42 observations in our study.

Besides the dependent and independent variables, I also included three control variables: Internet accessibility, economic development and regime type. These variables may also have an effect on the popular support of governments, and by controlling them in the data analysis, we can have more accurate result on the relations between Internet freedom and popular support of governments. The accessibility of Internet is measured by the number of Internet users per 100 people. Different from the accessibility of Internet content, this serves as an indicator of government’s performance on providing infrastructure. Together with economic development, as measured in GDP per capita, Internet accessibility affects people’s satisfaction with their governments. The third control variable is regime type and the score of the variable ranges from +10 (full democracy) to -10 (full autocracy). Countries with a democratic government generally enjoy greater support and are less likely to impose restriction over Internet freedom.

Figure 1 shows the bivariate relationship between Internet freedom and confidence in government. As indicated by the graph, there is a positive correlation and the increase in Internet restriction score is associated with the increase in government support.

Table 1 shows us how much the independent variable and control variables determined people’s confidence in their governments. Model 1 presents the unconditional effects, and Model 3 presents conditional effects. Without taking into consideration of other variables, every 1 point increase in Internet restriction is associated with 0.005-unit increase in confidence in national governments. The result is statistically significant (p<0.01) which means that there is only 1% possibility that the observed relationship happened purely by chance. After conditioning the effect of Internet accessibility, economic development and regime type on popular support of the government, the effect of our independent variable decreases, though not significantly, to 0.004. The result is still statistically significant. It is also worth mentioning that an increase in democracy score is associated with a slight decrease in government support, though the result is not statistically significant.

The finding seems to support the rationality behind controlling the Internet. What may be the possible explanation? First, the distrust of government stems from all social aspects. Factors like uncertain economic development, endangered national security and corrupted government can all lead to decreasing confidence in the ruling party. These problems exist in every country. As Internet growing to become the major source of information, countries with little or no restriction over Internet have to deal with all the reports on social problems, while countries with monopolies over information simply eliminate any challenging or disapproving opinions. This of course does not mean that countries like United States have more social problems than countries like Russia, but people do tend to have greater support of their governments when exposed to less unfavorable news. The theory may also be supported by the negative relationship between democratic level and confidence in government.

Does the finding mean that governments with a need to increase people’s support should start monitoring the Internet? Maybe, if they are desperate. But controlling information flow is never the solution to the dissatisfaction and distrust of the government. Governments should accept the fact that information is spreading faster than ever with the help of Internet. Instead of trying to control it, they should have faster and more effective response to possible accusation spreading online and also learn to use the Internet to their own advantage in publicity.

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