The Price of Collaboration: How Authoritarian States Retain Control

Piotrowska, Barbara Maria

doi:10.1177/0010414020912277

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…When authoritarian regimes want to recruit informants among regime opponents, they have to pay a steep price. Piotrowska (2020) shows that in East Germany, the Stasi had to pay significantly more for informants in towns that had freer media environments.…”

Section: Infiltrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Control

Hassan

Mattingly

Nugent

2022

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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Political leaders use different tactics to ensure widespread compliance with state policies and to minimize resistance. Scholarship tends to treat different tactics individually, suggesting fundamental dissimilarities in underpinning logic and goals. We introduce political control as a concept that unifies these different tactics within a single framework and demonstrate the analytical utility of considering seemingly disparate strategies in conversation rather than in isolation. We synthesize a growing recent literature on political control, including innovative approaches to repression as well as studies of indoctrination, distribution, and infiltration. We argue that tactics of political control can be understood to vary along two primary dimensions: the level of violence and the materiality of rewards. We highlight recent inquiry into the downstream effects of political control. We conclude with a call for more research on political control that considers combinations of different tactics, across regime types, in a world where tolerance of violent repression is diminishing. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Section: Infiltrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Control

Hassan

Mattingly

Nugent

2022

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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“…I also make a novel contribution to our understanding of the subnational determinants of coercive capacity. Reforms inside coercive institutions have significant effects on their capacity at the local level that must be considered alongside arguments that repression will be targeted at threatening (Hassan, 2017;Thomson, 2017;Blaydes, 2018;Piotrowska, 2020) or concentrated groups (Tyson, 2018). I also make a contribution to the literature on authoritarian bureaucracies.…”

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confidence: 98%

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

Thomson

2023

PSRM

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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.

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Dissent Networks, State Repression, and Strategic Clemency for Defection

Liu

2022

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Why do governments severely punish some dissidents while showing mercy to others? This study argues that when constrained by limited information on dissent, states have incentives to cast the net of repression wider by executing not just key dissent actors but also members closely connected to them to ensure demobilization. States also crave information, and granting clemency to defectors who bring in information improves state intelligence. Given that tips have different values, regimes will grant clemency to defectors who are closely connected to key dissent actors and possess high-value tips, allowing the state to pursue top fugitives and dissolve resistance more efficiently. Using newly declassified data on political victims during Taiwan’s White Terror authoritarian period, I find that the regime tends to execute both key actors (i.e., leaders and recruiters) and their closely connected members. Defectors who share information tend to receive mercy, but defectors closely connected to key actors are much less likely to face execution than less connected defectors. These findings shed new insight into the toolkit dictators use to gather intelligence on dissent and how strategic clemency induces defection and betrayal among dissidents, helping destroy dissent networks from within.

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The Price of Collaboration: How Authoritarian States Retain Control

Cited by 4 publications

References 45 publications

Political Control

Political Control

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

Dissent Networks, State Repression, and Strategic Clemency for Defection

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