Thomson’s “Watching the Watchers”

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Henry Thomson’s “Watching the Watchers: Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe”

This roundtable brings together scholars of authoritarian regimes and communist and post-communist politics to discuss Henry Thomson’s “Watching the Watchers: Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe” which will be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2024.

Coercive institutions are at the core of authoritarian politics. Dictators use agencies like the East German Stasi or Romanian Securitate to detect and repress opposition. But those same agencies and the people that lead them can become threatening. Secret policemen can pursue their own goals, become ineffective against opposition threats, or even act against dictators by becoming involved in coups.

Thomson’s book offers a new theory of how dictators solve the problem of delegating and controlling repression to coercive institutions. He argues that instead of calibrating institutional design to meet political threats, the cohesion of authoritarian elites constrains and determines how dictators build coercive institutions. Where elites are cohesive and cooperate to monitor and control the secret police, dictators build these agencies to become large and effective. Where elites are divided and cannot coalesce around a repressive strategy, the secret police are difficult to control and must be kept on a very short leash, relatively powerless and ineffective.

The book tests this argument using detailed qualitative case studies of East Germany and Poland, and new cross-national quantitative data from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania 1945-1989. Using Stalin’s death as an exogenous shock, Thomson shows that where elite cohesion collapsed and Stalinist coalitions were toppled, regimes shrank the size of their coercive institutions. These ineffective agencies were less able to repress opposition and prevent social disorder and political instability.

Panelists include Milan Svolik, Monika Nalepa, Martin Dimitrov and Alexander de Juan. Diverse in methodological and substantive expertise, they will engage with the book to provide a stimulating discussion of repression and coercive institutions under authoritarian regimes.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Chair

• Bryn Rosenfeld Cornell University

Presenters

• Henry Thomson Arizona State University

• Monika Nalepa University of Chicago

• Martin Dimitrov Tulane University

• Alexander De Juan Osnabrück University