The centrality of a strong state security apparatus to the maintenance of authoritarian rule has been highlighted in classic studies of singleparty regimes as well as in more recent research on authoritarian resilience in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 1 The general insight is that the state security system helps preserve authoritarian regimes by the threat or use of repression. Although this is doubtless true, existing studies have not usually examined some fundamental questions related to the operation of state security in single-party autocracies. In particular, we focus here on two related issues. First, how do state security agencies collect information? Second, how is this information used?The answer to the ªrst question reveals the importance of the recruitment of informants in the state security networks, a topic that has not received theoretical attention in the existing political science literature. With regard to the second question, we demonstrate how information affects decisions about the deployment of repression. We argue that single-party autocracies continuously extract information by recruiting ordinary citizens to participate (voluntarily or involuntarily) as informants in the state security networks and use the information gathered to mete out repression. Our major counterintuitive claim is that totalistic repression exists in information-poor environments. Therefore, as the quality of information increases, repression becomes more selective and targeted. Our focus on information gathering 1. Hannah Arendt,
China and Russia, along with a number of other countries, demonstrate that capitalism can exist without Western-style democracy, at least for a period of time.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.