Research In Authoritarian Regimes: Transparency Tradeoffs And Solutions

Conducting research in authoritarian regimes, especially ones with politicized courts, bureaucracy, and academia, entails many risks not encountered in research in advanced democracies. These risks affect numerous aspects of research, both qualita-tive and quantitative, with important implications for research transparency. In this brief essay, I focus on the key risk of con-ducting research in established authoritarian regimes: namely, physical risks to one’s local informants and collaborators. Mini-mizing these risks will entail trading off ideal practices of trans-parency and replicability. However, scholars of authoritarian regimes can and should provide information on how they have tailored their research due to constraints imposed by the re-gime and their inability to provide complete information about interviewees and informants. Such transparency at least would allow readers to make better judgments about the quality of the data, if not to replicate the research. Also, scholars of au-thoritarian regimes can increasingly make use of nonhuman data sources that allow for a higher degree of transparency. Thus, a multi-method approach, employing data from multiple sources, is especially advisable for researching authoritarian regimes.