The bureaucratic politics of authoritarian repression: intra-agency reform and surveillance capacity in communist Poland

Abstract

Coercive institutions' internal structures remain poorly understood. Bureaucratic reorganizations within security institutions cause significant variation in their behavior, however. Intra-agency reforms interact with officers' careerist incentives to cause changes in coercive capacity or repression. In this paper, I test the effects of intra-agency reforms on surveillance capacity. I exploit a rare source of exogenous variation in the structure of the secret police in communist Poland. Difference-in-differences models find that when security headquarters were duplicated through an administrative reform, the proliferation of higher-level posts within the service caused a large and statistically significant increase in the number of informants it employed. Intra-agency reform substantially altered the agency's coercive capacity. Previously overlooked dynamics within coercive institutions have important effects on authoritarian repression.