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transparency and facilitate the application of impersonal rules, the Internet has the potential to
aid in the transformation from a patrimonial civil service to one that can be considered a rational
bureaucracy in the Weberian sense. In cases where corruption and abuses of power are most
prevalent at the lower levels of government, and where regime legitimacy depends on delivering
sound economic performance and good governance, there may be political will to use the
Internet in processes of bureaucratization even where governments are reluctant to liberalize this
particular sphere of communications. By enhancing legitimacy, use of the Internet in
bureaucratization may consolidate authoritarian rule in the short term, but a bureaucratic public
administration will be important for the quality of democracy if and when a transition takes place
in the future.
Throughout the paper I illustrate these conceptual and theoretical arguments about the
Internet in authoritarian regimes with evidence from the cases of China and Saudi Arabia. On the
question of controlling public use of the Internet, these cases are not intended to be
representative of authoritarian regimes as a whole. As the two countries that have developed
what are probably the world’s most extensive technological mechanisms for Internet censorship,
China and Saudi Arabia represent what is possible rather than what is typical. If each has largely
succeeded in establishing control over the Internet, others may prove similarly capable in the
future.
1
With respect to Internet use in promoting processes of bureaucratization, Saudi Arabia
and China differ in important ways that make this pair of countries more representative of a
larger population and also illustrate the crucial role of political will. While corruption in China is
most prevalent at lower levels of public administration and threatens the regime’s main basis of
Convention