Preventive Repression: Two Types of Moral Hazard

Abstract

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.

Mowing the grass

“…The key assumptions are that (i) the anti-government group can acquire capacity that persists absent government intervention, (ii) the interaction is potentially infinite, and (iii) the government cannot commit to use intervention against the group in all interactions. Potential examples include how governments use targeted killings against criminal organizations (Calderón et al, 2015; Castillo, 2021), how nationalists repress secessionist groups (Gibilisco, 2021; Lacina, 2014), or how autocrats use covert tactics to suppress opposition movements (Nalepa and Pop-Eleches, 2022; Dragu and Przeworski, 2019). The empirical section illustrates that the model’s equilibrium strategies can be estimated even when the actions and state variable are not directly observed by the analyst, which is particularly important when studying covert government actions.…”

Secret Police Organizations and State Repression

“…While these tactics are aimed at reducing regime insiders’ willingness and opportunity to challenge the ruler, the core approach to tackling such challenges from outside of the regime is repression (see e.g. Davenport 2007; Dragu and Przeworski 2019; Sullivan 2016). Specifically, preemptive repression serves to make opposition mobilization costly, to deter citizens from joining it, and to hence prevent threats before they have the chance to grow and require reactive repression.…”

Stealing an Election: Violence or Fraud?

“…Rather than examining different tactics of electoral manipulation, though, they focus on the collective action problems inherent in large-scale electoral fraud. 11 A recent line of research similarly considers the contracting problems inherent in repressive regimes (Tyson 2018; Dragu and Przeworski 2019). An important distinction between our framework and this research is that we distinguish between contracting for violence and contracting for fraud, with fraud being uniquely subject to problems of moral hazard.…”