The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya

Abstract

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal-agent problem: Officers can shirk from the autocrat's demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area's importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an individual officer, which is a function of the officer's expected benefits from the president winning reelection. Using a data set of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president's coethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition's coethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This article demonstrates how state institutions from a country's previous authoritarian regime can persist despite the introduction of multi-party elections and thus prevent full democratization.

Street-Level Repression: Protest, Policing, and the Generation of Dissent in Uganda

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“…Uganda's Electoral Democracy Score (1970-2017 : Electoral Democracy Index internal and external threats to his political survival. Third, the Uganda Police Force (UPF), led by the Inspector General of Police (IGP), fall under the direct control of the president.…”

Trickle-Down Ethnic Politics: Drunk and Absent in the Kenya Police Force (1957–1970)

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For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Political Legacy of China's Cultural Revolution

“…What is the long-term effect of state-sponsored violence on authoritarian rulers' legitimacy? Autocrats use repression to maintain political order, promote economic development, and lengthen their term in office (Haggard 1986;Davenport 1995; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2011; Svolik 2012; Bhasin and Gandhi 2013;Greitens 2016;Hassan 2016). Many autocracies remain robust facing societal challenges thanks to coercion (Bellin 2004;Levitsky and Way 2012).…”