Economic Opportunities, Emigration and Exit Prisoners

Abstract

How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economic opportunities in West Germany increased, the number of East German exit prisoners – political prisoners arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally – also rose. The study's causal identification strategy exploits occupation-specific differences in the changing economic opportunities between East and West Germany. Using differential access to West German television, it also sheds light on the informational mechanism underlying the main finding; cross-national data are leveraged to present evidence of the external validity of the estimates. The results highlight how global economic disparities affect politics within authoritarian regimes.

The Impact of Domestic Surveillance on Political Imprisonment: Evidence from the German Democratic Republic

“…I operationalize local levels of overt repression with the county-level frequency of political imprisonment. I use data from the Stasi’s political prisoner database (see Horz and Marbach 2020). Local levels of intelligence were a function of the degree of infiltration with IMs that represented the primary source of intelligence for the Stasi (Port 2007, 97-111).…”

“…To operationalize political imprisonment, I use the Stasi’s digital prisoner database that stores detailed information about the entire prisoner population (digitized by Horz and Marbach 2020). I differentiate ‘political’ prisoners from ‘criminal’ prisoners with the criminal paragraphs based on which individuals were sentenced.…”

“…20The analysis is limited to this time period since the political prisoner data has been only validated for these years (Horz and Marbach 2020). …”

Emigration and Radical Right Populism

“…Most importantly, we advance scholarship on the political effects of emigration. This work has largely focused on international emigration and its effects on political and economic outcomes in autocratic or more recently democratized countries (Adida and Girod, 2011;Hirschman, 1993;Horz and Marbach, 2020;Karadja and Prawitz, 2019;Kelemen, 2020;Miller and Peters, 2020;Sellars, 2019). We show that emigration in the form of internal migration is an important phenomenon in high-income democracies and argue that it can portend significant political change here as well, undermining liberal democracy where it had long been attained and potentially endangering its consolidation elsewhere.…”

Political Imprisonment and Protest Mobilization: Evidence From the GDR

“…Information on individual prisoners is drawn from the digital prisoner database compiled by the Stasi and digitized by Horz and Marbach (2020). This database contains detailed information on the entire prison population including the criminal charges and the prior residences of all prisoners.…”