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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 767-782 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Political Science Research and Methods |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 1 2024 |
Keywords
- civil/domestic conflict
- comparative politics: industrialized countries
- comparative politics: political institutions
- international security
- political economy
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Political Science and International Relations