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8 - Chekists and Secret Informants: Post-Stalinist Transitions, Elite Cohesion, and Coercive Capacity

from Part III - Cross-national Quantitative Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2024

Henry Thomson
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Summary

In this chapter, I test the effects of post-Stalinist transitions on two important measures of agency capacity: officers employed and individuals registered as secret informants by coercive agencies. I present an original cross-national dataset on officer and informant numbers for every coercive agency in communist Central and Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989. I show that countries that experienced post-Stalinist transitions had similarly sized coercive agencies to other states before 1953, but these agencies shrank thereafter while others continued to grow. I then estimate a series of difference-in-difference models to test the effect of post-Stalinist transitions on agency size. I find that agencies under post-Stalinist regimes had significantly smaller coercive agencies after Stalin’s death. This confirms the theoretical logic laid out in Chapter 2 in a broader setting than the comparative historical analyses of Poland and East Germany in Chapters 4 and 5. Although the number of cases and coverage of data here are limited, my results suggest that the logic of elite cohesion and coercive capacity laid out in Chapter 2 is applicable to a wide range of authoritarian regimes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Watching the Watchers
Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe
, pp. 223 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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