The Agency Problem Underlying Repression

Tyson, Scott A.

doi:10.1086/698887

Cited by 45 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Principals typically opt to employ repression to remain in power. In most models, if the principal did not set a policy of repression or contract her security apparatus to repress, repression would not occur in equilibrium (Dragu and Lupu 2018; Dragu and Polborn 2013; Dragu and Przeworski 2019; Tyson 2018). Indeed, unless agents value implementing repression for noninstrumental reasons, as implied by Conrad and Moore (2010), these arguments do not predict rights abuses in the absence of a principal's directives.…”

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confidence: 99%

Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent

Slough

Fariss

2020

American J Political Sci

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Existing explanations of human rights abuses emphasize a strategic logic of repression. Yet certain classes of abuses may arise absent the intent to repress because of the misaligned bureaucratic incentives of state agents. To separate accounts of strategic repression from bureaucratic incentives, we study the responses of state agents working within the Haitian criminal justice system to a randomized, free legal assistance intervention for detainees held in illegal pretrial detention. Legal assistance addresses moral hazard problems of the bureaucrats responsible for processing cases. We demonstrate that legal assistance accelerates case advancement and liberation, in line with the view that large‐scale human rights abuses in the justice system can result from poor governance and not repressive intent.

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confidence: 99%

Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent

Slough

Fariss

2020

American J Political Sci

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“…In both cases, the autocrat targeted subordinates from the communist party, the army, and the bureaucracy (Conquest 2008). In both cases, the general population also fell victim to a violent repression (in Online Appendix F.3, we show how our framework can be adapted to study repression; there are, however, different approaches, e.g., Tyson 2018). 6 The particular characteristics of the Great Terror and the Cultural Revolution, our theory contends, can be explained by a low cost of violence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mass Purges: Top-Down Accountability in Autocracy

Montagnes

Wolton

2019

Am Polit Sci Rev

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This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to study the features of mass purges in authoritarian regimes. We contend that mass purges are an instrument of top-down accountability meant to motivate and screen a multitude of agents (e.g., single-party members, state bureaucrats). We show that the set of purged agents is well delineated in mild purges, whereas no performance indicator is a guarantee of safety in violent purges. The proportion of purged agents is non-monotonic in the intensity of violence. For the autocrat, increasing the intensity of violence always raises performance, but it improves the selection of subordinates only if violence is low to begin with. Hence, even absent de jure checks, the autocrat is de facto constrained by her subordinates’ strategic behavior. We use historical (including the Soviet purges and the Cultural Revolution) and recent (the Erdogan purge) events to illustrate our key theoretical findings.

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“…A broader account of agency theory suggests that the recurrence of agency problems can serve as a theoretical frame for understanding a wide variety of power situations (Adams 1996(Adams , 2010(Adams , 2011Norton 2015;Reed 2017;Shapiro 2005). Building on this work, we can view state-formation as the emergence of a solution to the problem of how a small set of principals (rulers) can secure and ensure that their agents (staff, allied elites) enforce the rulers' will and maintain the rulers' legitimacy (to some degree) over the general population, under varying threat from opponents (Tyson 2018).…”

Section: State-formation As the Resolution Of Agency Problems: Three mentioning

confidence: 99%

Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic

Reed

2019

Am Sociol Rev

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How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about, supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension, in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state’s success (or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their character and effectiveness to “the state,” the state is performed into being. In particular, public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic (1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.

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The Agency Problem Underlying Repression

Cited by 45 publications

References 39 publications

Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent

Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent

Mass Purges: Top-Down Accountability in Autocracy

Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic

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