Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina

Abstract

Autocrats depend on a capable secret police. Anecdotal evidence, however, often characterizes agents as surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect. To explain this puzzle, this article focuses on the career incentives underachieving individuals face in the regular security apparatus. Low-performing officials in hierarchical organizations have little chance of being promoted or filling lucrative positions. To salvage their careers, these officials are willing to undertake burdensome secret police work. Using data on all 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina (1975-83), we study biographic differences between secret police agents and the entire recruitment pool. We find that low-achieving officers were stuck within the regime hierarchy, threatened with discharge, and thus more likely to join the secret police for future benefits. The study demonstrates how state bureaucracies breed mundane career concerns that produce willing enforcers and cement violent regimes. This has implications for the understanding of autocratic consolidation and democratic breakdown. Replication Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PGFOXW. "We don't want clever people. We want mediocrities."-Officer, Greek Military Police 1 A utocracies are notorious for their systematic violation of civil liberties and human rights (e.g., Davenport 2007; Frantz and Kendall-Taylor 2014; Valentino 2004). At the core of autocratic repression stand secret police forces (Arendt 2017; Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965). For centuries, regimes have made extensive use of and largely depended on the loyalty of such organizations (Baldwin 1934; Greitens 2016; Plate and Darvi 1982). Charged with the responsibility to protect the regime from internal and external threats, secret

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

“…Empirically, disentangling these components of capacity is difficult (Berwick and Christia 2018); yet, policy implications depend on the sources of limited capacity. We present novel measurement of agents' actions, arguably the hardest input to measure, complementing recent analysis of agent quality in the domain of state‐sanctioned repression (Scarpf and Gläßel forthcoming) and policing (Goncalves and Mello 2018). Second, our evidence on how agents' behavior within justice system institutions conditions justice system outcomes contributes a mechanism to enduring debates on the effects of justice system design on outcomes (e.g., La Porta et al.…”

The Price of Collaboration: How Authoritarian States Retain Control

“…Hall (2009) argues that these authors are wrong in discounting the importance of paid informers. Finally, Scharpf and Gläßel (2020) explain the low quality of secret police agents in terms of the organizational structure of the Argentinian security apparatus. Stasi-specific research has produced its own vast literature (see, for example, Dennis, 2003; Müller-Enbergs, 2001, 2008a, 2008b).…”

“…The second stream of literature this article speaks to concentrates on the relationship between authoritarian states and their citizens and the motivations that led people to collaborate (Dennis, 2003; Fitzpatrick & Gellately, 1996; Gellately, 1988; Hall, 2009; Müller-Enbergs, 2001; Scharpf & Gläßel, 2020). Gellately’s (1988), Fitzpatrick and Gellately’s (1996), and Hall’s (2009) work sees denunciations (often driven by private interest or “settling old scores”) to the Gestapo as paramount in creating a self-policing state.…”

Dissent Networks, State Repression, and Strategic Clemency for Defection

“…Stasi, the notorious secret police agency in East Germany, is an iconic example. However, external monitoring via delegated agents can be expensive and time-consuming since building a sophisticated and functional surveillance system takes time and requires substantial infrastructure development (Xu, 2021), equipment and personnel (Scharpf and Glaßel, 2019), and resources to purchase civilian informants (Piotrowska, 2020). Thus, external monitoring systems are usually supplemented by cheaper but more effective internal monitoring to gather dissent information (Heckathorn, 1988).…”