Mass Purges: Top-Down Accountability in Autocracy

Abstract

This paper contends that mass purges are a salient method of top-down accountability used by totalitarian regimes to increase party performance and shape party membership. In our theoretical framework, party members work on independent projects. Their fate, however, is linked through the purge, and a member’s effort depends on the activism of all others via what we call the pool size effect. In turn, the autocrat’s incentive to purge depends on the informativeness of different performance indicators, a function of all members’ effort via what we term the pool makeup effect. These novel pool effects emerge from the many (party members) to one (autocrat) accountability problem faced by the principal. Our approach also highlights how violence affects top-down accountability in autocracy. Greater intensity of violence increases effort, but can impede selection. The autocrat thus cannot escape a trade-off between love (less unity) and fear (more activism).