The Bureaucratic Politics of Authoritarian Repression: Intra-Agency Reform and Surveillance Capacity in Communist Poland

Abstract

The internal structures of authoritarian coercive institutions are poorly understood, despite the centrality of these institutions to autocratic regimes. I argue that the internal bureaucratic politics of coercive institutions are an important but under-studied determinant of their capacity. Specifically, intra-agency reforms that encourage yardstick competition among promotion-seeking officers cause growth in tangible indicators of officer performance. I test this argument using an exogenous shock to the regional organization of the state security apparatus in communist Poland. I find that an administrative unit reform caused greater numbers of secret collaborators to be registered with the agency where pre-reform districts were split into two or more secret police administrations. The reform's effects were large, substantially altering the agency's surveillance and repressive capacity during a period of otherwise stable institutional development. These results highlight common but previously overlooked internal dynamics of coercive agencies that deserve greater attention from scholars of authoritarian rule.