You don't have to censor people to silence them. You only have to remind them they might be seen.
Surveillance is usually studied through its dramatic end — arrests, crackdowns. But its everyday power is quieter: it shapes whether ordinary people are willing to voice an opinion at all. The study asks how the mere awareness of state monitoring changes that willingness.
Citizens don't have only two options — speak or stay silent. The paper theorizes a range of responses along an evasion–deception spectrum: from quietly opting out, to self-censoring, to actively falsifying what you really think.
In an online survey experiment in Japan, some respondents were reminded of the government's capacity to monitor them. Those respondents were substantially more likely to opt out of sharing their opinions — even though opting out carried a monetary cost, and even though Japan is a fully consolidated democracy where freedom of speech is legally protected.
We tend to file the costs of surveillance under authoritarianism. This shows the chill reaches into healthy democracies too: when people sense they're being watched, some simply withdraw from public conversation — and a debate missing its quietest voices is a thinner debate than it looks.
Eck, Kristine, Sophia Hatz, Charles Crabtree, and Atsushi Tago. “Evade and Deceive? Citizen Responses to Surveillance.” Journal of Politics 83(4): 1545–1558, 2021.
read the paper →an online survey experiment fielded in japan · the spectrum and cards summarize the paper's framework and direction of results; estimates live in the paper