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

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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 languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)767-782
Number of pages16
JournalPolitical Science Research and Methods
Volume12
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 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

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