‘Terrifyingly Normal’ Authoritarian Bureaucracies: Secret Police Administration and Surveillance in Socialist Poland

Abstract

Coercive institutions are essential components of authoritarian states and contribute to regime durability. However, variation in the internal structures of these institutions remains relatively unexplored. I argue that frequent intra-agency reforms of coercive institutions shape the incentives and constraints facing individual bureaucrats. Increases in the number of units within an agency responsible for the same task generate competition for successful outcomes on tangible, observable indicators, such as the registration of collaborators who provide information on the opposition. I test this argument using a research design which exploits an exogenous shock to the organization of the state security apparatus caused by an administrative district reform in socialist Poland. I find that areas which saw an increase in the number of regional secret police offices experienced significantly faster growth in the state security's network of secret informants and collaborators. The effects of the reform on the collaborator network were large, even compared to those of mass unrest in 1976, and increasing both through time and with the number of new administrations created. My results suggest that internal structures and reforms of authoritarian bureaucracies deserve greater attention from scholars of autocracy and democratization.