How (Not) to Hide Your Data

While authoritarian regimes are typically seen as prone to secrecy and restricting access to data, individual autocracies differ greatly from each other—some are better in terms of data accessibility and quality than others. The preference of autocracies for secrecy is likely to depend on a large number of scope conditions. One particularly likely condition is the perception of external and domestic threats, which ought to make the preference for secrecy stronger. From this perspective, we look at how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine affected the data availability preferences of the Russian authoritarian regime. Whereas before the invasion, Russia belonged to autocracies with relatively high data availability, the war led to decreasing data availability and quality. At the same time, even after the full-scale invasion, Russia continues to publish a large number of datasets and allows data collection by independent pollsters. We discuss the implications of this development for Russian studies..