Collective Action and Constraints on Repression at the Endgame

Dragu, Tiberiu; Lupu, Yonatan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2992622

Cited by 14 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Secret police agents uncover conspiracies and protect the regime against internal and external enemies, which makes leaders vulnerable to resistance from within those organizations (Greitens ; Plate and Darvi ). Noncompliance in the core repressive unit reveals the government's weakness and enables opposition groups, rival regime elites, and other security forces to turn against it (Albrecht and Ohl ; DeMeritt ; Dragu and Lupu ).…”

Section: Research On Dictators and Coercive Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina

Scharpf

Gläßel

2019

American J Political Sci

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Autocrats depend on a capable secret police. Anecdotal evidence, however, often characterizes agents as surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect. To explain this puzzle, this article focuses on the career incentives underachieving individuals face in the regular security apparatus. Low-performing officials in hierarchical organizations have little chance of being promoted or filling lucrative positions. To salvage their careers, these officials are willing to undertake burdensome secret police work. Using data on all 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina (1975-83), we study biographic differences between secret police agents and the entire recruitment pool. We find that low-achieving officers were stuck within the regime hierarchy, threatened with discharge, and thus more likely to join the secret police for future benefits. The study demonstrates how state bureaucracies breed mundane career concerns that produce willing enforcers and cement violent regimes. This has implications for the understanding of autocratic consolidation and democratic breakdown. Replication Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PGFOXW. "We don't want clever people. We want mediocrities."-Officer, Greek Military Police 1 A utocracies are notorious for their systematic violation of civil liberties and human rights (e.g., Davenport 2007; Frantz and Kendall-Taylor 2014; Valentino 2004). At the core of autocratic repression stand secret police forces (Arendt 2017; Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965). For centuries, regimes have made extensive use of and largely depended on the loyalty of such organizations (Baldwin 1934; Greitens 2016; Plate and Darvi 1982). Charged with the responsibility to protect the regime from internal and external threats, secret

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Section: Research On Dictators and Coercive Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina

Scharpf

Gläßel

2019

American J Political Sci

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“…Principals typically opt to employ repression to remain in power. In most models, if the principal did not set a policy of repression or contract her security apparatus to repress, repression would not occur in equilibrium (Dragu and Lupu 2018; Dragu and Polborn 2013; Dragu and Przeworski 2019; Tyson 2018). Indeed, unless agents value implementing repression for noninstrumental reasons, as implied by Conrad and Moore (2010), these arguments do not predict rights abuses in the absence of a principal's directives.…”

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confidence: 99%

Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent

Slough

Fariss

2020

American J Political Sci

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Existing explanations of human rights abuses emphasize a strategic logic of repression. Yet certain classes of abuses may arise absent the intent to repress because of the misaligned bureaucratic incentives of state agents. To separate accounts of strategic repression from bureaucratic incentives, we study the responses of state agents working within the Haitian criminal justice system to a randomized, free legal assistance intervention for detainees held in illegal pretrial detention. Legal assistance addresses moral hazard problems of the bureaucrats responsible for processing cases. We demonstrate that legal assistance accelerates case advancement and liberation, in line with the view that large‐scale human rights abuses in the justice system can result from poor governance and not repressive intent.

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“…The military is neither trained, specifically equipped, nor motivated to engage in domestic repression so that using them to squelch protests typically becomes a last resort. 2 Second, calling upon and relying on the military involves considerable political risks in terms of ruler survival in power both because the military might simply refuse to obey an order to repress (Dragu and Lupu 2018; Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas 2010) or because the military may exploit the vulnerability of the regime to overthrow it (Acemoglu, Ticchi, and Vendini 2010; Albrecht and Ohl 2016; Besley and Robinson 2010; Svolik 2013).…”

Section: Preventive Repressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preventive Repression: Two Types of Moral Hazard

Dragu

Przeworski

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily through preventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized security agencies with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizing and threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyze the moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agent relationship between rulers and their security agents in charge of preventive repression. The model distinguishes two types of moral hazard: “politics,” through which the security agents can exert political influence to increase their payoff by decreasing the ruler’s rents from power, and “corruption,” through which the agents can increase their payoff by engaging in rent-seeking activities that do not decrease the ruler’s rents from power. The surprising conclusion is that both the ruler and the security agent are better off when the only moral hazard problem available is politics rather than when the agent can choose between politics and corruption. We also show that the equilibrium probability of ruler’s survival in power is higher when politics is the only moral hazard available to the agent. These findings lead to our central conclusion that opportunities for corruption undermine authoritarian rule by distorting the incentives of the security agencies tasked with preventing potential threats to an authoritarian ruler’s grip on power.

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Collective Action and Constraints on Repression at the Endgame

Cited by 14 publications

References 55 publications

Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina

Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina

Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent

Preventive Repression: Two Types of Moral Hazard

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