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

Abstract

How does domestic surveillance affect the frequency of political imprisonments in autocratic states? In contrast to conventional wisdom, I argue that surveillance reduces the frequency of political imprisonments in power-maximizing autocracies. Surveillance decreases uncertainty about the correct targets of repression, allowing for more selective detentions and shifts to silent instruments of repression. To investigate these claims, I draw on a unique county-level dataset of political imprisonment in the German Democratic Republic between 1984 and 1988. I proxy the number of monitored individuals with newly collected county-level data on surveillance operations. I use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, random effects, and instrumental variable models to investigate the impact of surveillance on political imprisonment. I find that higher shares of spies per monitored individual were associated with a reduction of political imprisonment. Further, increasing levels of spy infiltration were linked to a systematic shift to silent instruments of repression.

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.…”

“…First, such knowledge, and secret police ability to generate it, can result in the deterrence of anti-regime activities which, in turn, also reduces the necessity of physical human rights violations (Greitens 2016;Judt 2005;Steinert 2023). The more likely citizens perceive it to be that dissident actions will be uncovered and sanctioned by the regime, the less likely they are to engage in such actions in the first place (De Jaegher and Hoyer 2019;Pierskalla 2010).…”

“…Beyond deterrence, secret police and the information they generate may also affect state repression by allowing for its more selective targeting . As secret police increase the quantity and quality of regimes’ information on anti-government activities, they also allow regimes to better distinguish between dissidents and the public, increasing their ability to target the former group (see Dimitrov and Sassoon 2014; Kalyvas 2006; Steinert 2023). In contrast, a lack of information on who opposes the regime results in the indiscriminate targeting of groups suspected of anti-regime views based on broad heuristics such as demographic attributes.…”

Political Imprisonment and Protest Mobilization: Evidence From the GDR

“…To address this issue, we proxy latent dissent among the East German population using originally collected data based on archival records on the county-level number of surveillance operations (Steinert, 2022). The Stasi ruled that all surveillance operations had to be registered by the heads of the county administrations.…”