Describing and Analyzing Elite Advocates of State Coercion

• In Event: State Repression and Human Rights

Abstract

How do security threats generate democratic erosion, and under what conditions do elite actors build public support for such democratic erosion? In this project, we present a novel concept for empirical political scientists who study contentious politics, state repression, authoritarian regimes, and democratic backsliding. We define a security entrepreneur as an individual or group of connected individuals in the security apparatus, elected office, or in para-state positions who seek to leverage their influence to move a domain of politics into the domain of security. We provide a typology and illustrative descriptive case studies of security entrepreneurs, and then propose hypotheses for the conditions under which these actors generate support for the expansion of the security state. Non-state actor threat, identity divisions between the audience and the threatening actor, and the entrepreneur's regime embeddedness are expected to shape the rhetoric's effectiveness. We test the hypotheses with a pilot survey in Colombia.

Authors

• Pearce Edwards, Louisiana State University

• Daniel Arnon, University of Arizona