Study Significance
The article shows a mundane personnel mechanism—career incentives within regular security forces—that helps explain why autocrats staff secret police with mediocre but willing enforcers, which bears on how authoritarian regimes consolidate power and how democracies can break down.
Measuring Officers and Roles
The authors use comprehensive personnel records covering all 4,287 officers who served in Argentina between 1975 and 1983 and compare biographic characteristics and career outcomes between those who served in the secret police and the broader recruitment pool.
The replication package includes a dataset labeled SecretPolicedata.dta and codebooks that document the variables used to reproduce the analyses and figures.
Comparing Secret Police Agents to the Recruitment Pool
They compare officers who served in the secret police to the entire recruitment pool of officers in the same period to identify biographic and career-difference patterns associated with joining the secret police.
Main Findings
The study finds that lower-performing officers who were stagnating in the regular hierarchy and at risk of discharge were disproportionately likely to join the secret police, suggesting career salvage motives for undertaking secret police work.
Interpretation and Implications
The authors interpret the results as evidence that routine career management within state bureaucracies can produce willing enforcers for violent repression, meaning institutional personnel dynamics—rather than only ideology—help cement autocratic rule.
