This article examines why secret police units are staffed by surprisingly mediocre agents, arguing that career incentives in hierarchical security bureaucracies push underperforming officers toward clandestine work. Using biographic records for 4,287 Argentine officers (1975–83), the authors show that low-achieving officials, stuck in lower ranks and facing discharge risk, were more likely to join the secret police—an association tied to career preservation rather than ideology.
Opposition coalitions under electoral authoritarianism can boost opposition vote share and sometimes threaten regimes. This research asks whether coalitions also create risks: when a coalition performs strongly but fails to win power, does that paradoxically accelerate autocratization?
Violence against civilians is often treated as a single category, but civilians differ in ways that shape why they are targeted. This paper focuses on violence against local leaders — a widespread yet understudied form of wartime victimization — and argues that local leaders are preemptively targeted because of their potential to mobilize support.
This article asks how authoritarian regimes change repression strategies as economic growth coincides with rising opposition, using Taiwan’s KMT rule during 1949–1988 as a historical case. The author analyses the relationship among economic development, social movements, and repression tactics, arguing that growth encourages a move from indiscriminate mass violence to more targeted, less severe forms of coercion. The claim is developed with historical documents and statistical modelling over a 39-year time series.
Does state repression itself — even without deliberate information manipulation — change public attitudes so that citizens come to endorse the punished behaviors' condemnation and support further repression? The paper introduces the "authoritarian cue effect," where citizens interpret acts of repression as signals of the regime's disapproval and update their beliefs and attitudes accordingly.
Doubly robust difference-in-differences models are used to estimate the causal effect of successful coups on national income. Real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) falls by 10%–12% five years after a coup, and the effect has not begun to diminish by that point.
Curfews are a common non-violent tool for governments seeking military advantage during civil conflict, but they also disrupt everyday life and may spark political and military backlash. This study examines whether curfews achieve their intended effects or produce counterproductive outcomes in Turkey.
When digital surveillance becomes available in dictatorships, it alters the balance between repression and co-option. This study proposes an informational theory of authoritarian control suggesting that enhanced monitoring helps identify radical opponents.
The relationship between repression and political mobilization remains debated. This study examines police interventions during Catalonia's independence referendum on 1 October 2017, analyzing their impact on turnout through detailed aggregate data and a post-referendum survey.
This article asks how unrest spreads by testing a framework that separates (1) the networks that carry information, (2) whether news of repression changes participation, and (3) the role of organizers. The authors apply this framework to the English Swing riots of 1830–31 and use spatiotemporal variation specific to that historical episode to identify patterns of diffusion. Their contribution is an empirically grounded account of which kinds of ties mattered for riot diffusion and the role of local organizers in that process.
This article examines police violence against organized criminal groups (OCGs) in Rio de Janeiro. It offers a theory about five types of OCG regimes—Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Split—and how police intervention varies across these contexts.
State-sponsored violence during the 1960s Cultural Revolution created enduring anti-government attitudes among Chinese citizens, a new study reveals.
This study investigates the impact of imprisoning Saudi activists for online dissent. Analyzing over 300 million tweets and Google search data from 2010-2017, we find two key effects.
This article examines how authoritarian leaders respond to citizens seeking exit opportunities abroad.
Climate change action requires incorporating vulnerable populations into policy responses.
Civil society mobilization and human rights treaty ratifications put pressure on governments. But this can backfire: committed governments may demobilize critics to avoid scrutiny.
Rethinking traditional measures of political knowledge reveals their limitations when focusing solely on liberal-democratic perspectives. The study introduces carceral violence knowledge—a distinct domain crucial for understanding marginalized communities' realities. By including this dimension, we find that black youth possess significant expertise about state-sanctioned violence—an area where white youth often lag.
This research examines state violence during wartime through evidence from Peru. Context & Data In collaboration with Peruvian authorities, civilian agencies were tasked to support military operations amidst ongoing conflict. The study analyzes case studies and survey data collected across several regions.
This study investigates the surprising shift in American public opinion against lynching during the late 19th to early 20th century.
This study examines how migration-related money transfers—remittances—relate to violations of rights to physical integrity (for example, torture and political assassination) in the countries migrants leave behind. The focus is on whether remittances influence violent political repression within migrant-sending countries.
International demands for economic liberalization often create a compensation dynamic in autocracies.
Why do existing studies produce conflicting results on whether violence is more prevalent in middle-range regimes? This article examines multiple violent outcomes like civil war, terrorism, and repression across various operationalizations of 'the middle.' Using a novel ensemble method combining random forest and regression/classification trees to predict conflict patterns, we identify specific conditions where the hypothesis holds for minor civil conflicts but fails regarding state repression. Our findings clarify previous ambiguity by pinpointing when regime instability leads to violence.
The African Relational Pro-Government Militia Dataset (RPGMD) identifies pro-government militias (PGMs) operating in Africa between 1997 and 2014. The dataset documents the geographic proliferation and diffusion of these groups across the continent and supplies relational and contextual information that is often missing from existing sources.