Guardians of the Regime: Secret Police Formation in Autocracies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which autocratic regimes establish secret police, highlighting the roles of external threats, internal contestation, material resources, and personalized power in their emergence.

Contribution

It develops a theoretical framework and uses statistical methods to identify key predictors for secret police formation in autocracies, advancing understanding of authoritarian institutional choices.

Findings

Secret police are more likely with external threats like anti-system mobilization and international rivals.

Internal regime contestation abroad correlates with secret police emergence.

Material resources and personalized power are crucial for establishing secret police.

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.