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Guardians of the Regime: Secret Police Formation in Autocracies

Marius Mehrl, Mila Pfander, Theresa Winner, Cornelius Fritz

TL;DR

This study addresses when autocrats form secret police by developing a framework that distinguishes willingness, opportunity, and structure-shock dynamics, and applying a stratified LASSO-based variable selection to identify robust predictors. Using a dataset of 120 autocratic regimes spanning 1951–2018, with 31 secret police formations, the authors find that secret police are more likely under regime-external structural threats and when rulers possess adequate material resources and personalisation of power. Key findings show external threats (anti-system movements, protests) and regime resources (military spending, GDP per capita), along with personalisation, increase formation probability, while longer regime duration and higher civil society repression decrease it; domestic shocks like coups have limited predictive power. The work contributes a methodological advance for rare binary outcomes and offers a flexible framework and data/code for future research on autocratic security institutions and survival strategies.

Abstract

Autocrats use secret police to stay in power, as these organizations deter and suppress opposition to their rule. Existing research shows that secret police succeed at this but, surprisingly, also that they are not as ubiquitous in autocracies as one may assume, existing in fewer than half of autocratic country-years. We thus explore under which conditions secret police emerge in dictatorships. For this purpose, we develop a theoretical framework for potential predictors and apply statistical variable selection techniques to identify which of several candidate variables extracted from the literature on state security forces and authoritarian survival hold explanatory power. Our results highlight that secret police are more likely to emerge when rulers face structural, regime-external threats, such as organised anti-system mobilisation and international rivals, or witness successful regime-internal contestation abroad that hints at similar threats at home. But additionally, we find that rulers must have sufficient material resources and personalised power to establish secret police. This research contributes to our understanding of autocrats' institutional choices and authoritarian politics.

Guardians of the Regime: Secret Police Formation in Autocracies

TL;DR

This study addresses when autocrats form secret police by developing a framework that distinguishes willingness, opportunity, and structure-shock dynamics, and applying a stratified LASSO-based variable selection to identify robust predictors. Using a dataset of 120 autocratic regimes spanning 1951–2018, with 31 secret police formations, the authors find that secret police are more likely under regime-external structural threats and when rulers possess adequate material resources and personalisation of power. Key findings show external threats (anti-system movements, protests) and regime resources (military spending, GDP per capita), along with personalisation, increase formation probability, while longer regime duration and higher civil society repression decrease it; domestic shocks like coups have limited predictive power. The work contributes a methodological advance for rare binary outcomes and offers a flexible framework and data/code for future research on autocratic security institutions and survival strategies.

Abstract

Autocrats use secret police to stay in power, as these organizations deter and suppress opposition to their rule. Existing research shows that secret police succeed at this but, surprisingly, also that they are not as ubiquitous in autocracies as one may assume, existing in fewer than half of autocratic country-years. We thus explore under which conditions secret police emerge in dictatorships. For this purpose, we develop a theoretical framework for potential predictors and apply statistical variable selection techniques to identify which of several candidate variables extracted from the literature on state security forces and authoritarian survival hold explanatory power. Our results highlight that secret police are more likely to emerge when rulers face structural, regime-external threats, such as organised anti-system mobilisation and international rivals, or witness successful regime-internal contestation abroad that hints at similar threats at home. But additionally, we find that rulers must have sufficient material resources and personalised power to establish secret police. This research contributes to our understanding of autocrats' institutional choices and authoritarian politics.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 10 sections, 3 figures, 6 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The Predictors of State Security Force Structure
  3. The (Potential) Predictors of Secret Police
  4. Research Design
  5. Empirical Results
  6. Conclusion
  7. Data Sources and Software
  8. Main Results
  9. Results for Counterweight Dependent Variable
  10. Additional results

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Predictors of Secret Police: Marginal effect estimates with 90% and 95% confidence intervals (thick and thin whiskers, respectively). Each variable is associated with four coefficient estimates, corresponding to LASSO and Stepwise selection methods applied with logit and cloglog link functions. Coefficients for unselected variables plotted as zero to maintain comparability across approaches.
  • Figure A.1: Marginal effects for model with counterweight as target variable
  • Figure A.2: Marginal effects for model with first differences as covariates.