“That streets are peaceful does not mean there is no violence.”
Authoritarian regimes depend on repression, either preventive or remedial to protect themselves from threats.
“Preventive repression is aimed to render mute potential opposition and repress opponents before they carry out any activities that would threaten the stability of the regime. In this sense, preventive repression is ex ante with regard to public manifestations of protest and is distinct from remedial repression which occurs ex post, after prevention repression has failed and public protests materialize.” (Dragu and Przeworski)
Naturally, preventive repression is preferred because it is less costly and may be concealed, allowing the regime to maintain a democratic facade.
“With regards to repression, an ounce of prevention is worth of a pound of cure. No authoritarian regime wants to face a situation in which dissent had grown sufficiently powerful to necessitate large-scale military intervention in order to keep power.”(Dragu and Przeworski)
Preventive repression is exercised through security agencies, which carries its own risks.
“Preventive repression brings into politics an important political force: security agencies who may seek to extend their grasp inside the regime by engaging in political activities and power struggles… Ever since Edward Gibbons (2001[1896]) vividly described how the Praetorian Guards of the Roman Empire used their power to influence the selection of emperors, the fact that security agents can yield significant influence over their political principals has been the focus of studies of the relationship between rulers and their security agents”.
A second problem arises in the form of corruption when the secret police engages in graft, sell their services to private actors or invest in businesses. Dragu and Przeworski argue that corruption is more damaging to the rulers than political infighting because when agents have opportunities for corruption they have a weaker incentive to protect the rulers.
Either way, it is a problem.
“…in almost every autocratic regime relations between rulers and their security agents are perennially tense (Plate and Darvi 1981; Adelman 1984). A powerful security agency is a double-edge sword for political elites: it can be more effective in protecting the regime but it also creates a moral hazard problem by virtue of its de facto control over the means of violence.”
Threats to authoritarian rulers originate from two sources: the fellow members of regime elites, their closest collaborators, or from individuals potentially willing to engage in public actions against the regime (Geddes et al. 2014a; Svolik 2012; Greitens 2016; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2017).
No authoritarian ruler wants to face a situation in which their rivals become powerful enough to organize and threaten the ruler’s grip on power from the inside. Coup plots that are already hatched expose the rulers to the danger of having to engage in internal purges that undermine the cohesion of the elite and provide a signal of internal divisions to the potential opponents of the regime.
Consequently, authoritarian rulers primarily utilize and depend upon preventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized security agencies. The security apparatus typically includes three, not always institutionally distinct, bodies: ordinary police, secret police, and the germanderie. The secret police is sometimes euphemistically referred to as an “intelligence” agency, as in the Chilean Dirección Nacional de Intelligencia (DINA, 1973-77), or an “information” agency, as in still Chilean Central Nacional de Información (CNI, 1973-1990), but often it is officially denominated “Secret Police.”
The secret police employs professional spies and part-time informants to detect any potential opposition and “nip it in the bud,” in the language of the Paraguayan Stroessner regime. It seeks to identify dissatisfied individuals who are the center of larger communication networks (Perez Oviedo 2015; Siegel 2011) by relying on informers, intercepting communications, planting listening devices, and the like.
The “nipping” may entail physical elimination of potential adversaries (Gregory 2009), imprisonment, economic sanctions, prohibitions to travel, intimidation, blackmail, psychological and physical harassment, and the like (Plate and Darvi 1981; Adelman 1984; McMillan and Zoido 2004; Dobson 2012). Prevention may also include censorship, dissemination of false information and rumors, and distorting communication among the potential opposition (Koehler 2008; Guriev and Treisman 2015; Perez Oviedo 2015; Puddington 2017).
“today’s authoritarian regimes have replaced brutal forms of violence and mass killings with subtle methods of control and coercion: they have perfected the use of fear and intimidation to maintain their grip on power and have learned to rely on propaganda, censorship, and cooptation in place of large-scale repression of public dissent. Repression is indeed just one, even if essential, instrument by which authoritarian rulers maintain themselves in power (Gehlbach, Sonin, and Svolik 2016). Autocrats can coopt some potential opponents (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith2009), engage in propaganda (Edmond 2013, Chen and Xu 2015, Little 2017), engineer elections to legitimize their power (Cox 2009, Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009), or manufacture the semblance of a civil society by creating government-operated NGOs (Dobson 2012, Puddington 2017)”.
Repression is most effective when it is invisible, when regimes survive without having to beat, teargas, or kill their citizens. As someone has said, “That streets are peaceful does not mean there is no violence” (Przeworski 2015, 249). Visible manifestations of opposition occur only if preventive repression has not been effective to begin with, so that they represent failures of repressive regimes. And there is evidence (Dobson2012, Puddington 2017) that while autocrats may have increased their use of ballot-box,cooptation and control over information, they also learned to prevent public opposition from forming rather than having to squelch its visible manifestations.”
“The surprising conclusion of our analysis is that whenever the security apparatus has the option of engaging in corruption, it is a less effective instrument for defending the autocrat. The security agencies can and do engage in extorting money, perks, and privileges from the rulers, but they can be bought off at a relatively low cost.“
“Corruption is a more serious threat to the autocrat. If corruption is sufficiently rewarding to the security agents, the ruler knows that they will divert resources, so increasing their resources is pointless. As a result, the ruler allocates fewer resources to preventive repression, the regime is less likely to survive, and both the autocrat and its agents are worse-off than when corruption opportunities are not as rewarding.“
“One should not be surprised,therefore, that autocrats engage in anti-corruption campaigns and often purge their security apparatuses: the expected tenure of the heads of security agencies is short. The head of the Chinese security apparatus was among the first targets of Mr. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. But, as we know (Shleifer and Vishny 1993, Rose-Ackerman and Palifka 2016), controlling corruption is not an easy task. Corrupt security apparatus is the Achilles heel of autocratic regimes”.
Source: Dragu, T. and Przeworski, A., 2017. Preventive Repression: Two Types of Moral Hazard. [Online]. Available at: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/pegroup/files/draguprzeworski2017.pdf [Accessed 17 December 2019].
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