Political Imprisonment and Protest Mobilization: Evidence From the GDR

Abstract

How does political imprisonment influence anti-regime protest? We argue that political imprisonment facilitates rather than stifles protest. Political imprisonment is a salient indicator of arbitrary rule creating ‘embodied grievances’. It enables the formation of dissident networks within prisons, and serves as a legitimating credential for former inmates to lead resistance. These mechanisms imply that political imprisonment is a self-defeating strategy, making it easier for the opposition to overcome their collective action problem. We test our argument with subnational data from the German Democratic Republic between 1984 and 1989. To account for endogenous latent dissent, we use originally collected archival data on local surveillance operations. Exploiting daily variation in the timing of protests in 1989, we analyze the long-term impact of political imprisonment on mobilization. Results from survival analyses lend support to our hypothesized relationship. Combined with semi-structured interviews to probe our mechanisms, our findings suggest that political imprisonment increases the likelihood of protest mobilization.

Secret Police Organizations and State Repression

“…However, testing these additional mechanisms may be possible by focusing on single, well-documented cases such as the German Democratic Republic (see e.g. Steinert 2023; Steinert and Dworschak 2022) or once further data become available. Additionally, our results do not distinguish between preventive and reactive repression though recent theoretical results indicate that secret police, particularly due to their intelligence work, may shift state activity from the latter to the former type of human rights abuses.…”