Watch the Company You Keep: Elite Networks and Political Repression

• In Event: State Violence and State Repression

Abstract

How do the personal networks of political elites influence their risk of becoming the target of politically motivated repression? Most cross-national research examines patterns of repression at the national level, while individual-level studies typically analyze the consequences of state violence. Focusing on weakly institutionalized post-colonial states, my paper evaluates the effect of individual elites’ positions in their countries’ pre-independence political networks on their risk of different forms of political persecution following independence. I argue that rulers in weakly institutionalized states preemptively repress rival elites based on the latter’s threat potential, but tend to resort to deadly repression only if the perceived risk of backfiring is low. Both the perceived threat potential and backfiring risk, in turn, are shaped by individuals’ collective identity and their network connections. I leverage original micro-level data on the pre-independence political elite of 18 African countries, collected through a semi-automated coding of encyclopedic sources, that provide fine-grained information on the personal backgrounds, pre-independence political affiliations, and post-independence political trajectories of more than 800 elite individuals who were involved in their countries’ politics before independence. This allows me to evaluate the impact of both pre-independence network positions and post-independence group status on individuals’ risk of different forms of political persecution after independence. In line with my argument, I find that i) elite individuals from non-ruling ethnic groups are more than twice as likely to suffer political repression than individuals from ruling groups, and ii) individuals with high degrees of network cliquishness exhibit a particularly high repression risk, especially deadly repression. By contrast, iii) trans-ethnic connectedness reduces the likelihood of repression. I also present evidence that network cliquishness results from individuals’ membership in specific types of pre-independence organizations: namely, ethnically or religiously based organizations, and therefore is the unintended long-term consequence of early alliance choices by individual elites.

Author

• Manuel Vogt, University College London