Building Coercive Capacity: Three Essays

Abstract

This thesis is comprised of three chapters on different challenges state-builders face when creating an effective state apparatus. When principals (such as authoritarian leaders or elected representatives) set up security organs, they must make officials in the security services overcome collective action problems to maintain security. However, the achieved cooperation can also undermine state security by generating the potential for agency problems such as collusion and treason. Thus, leaders must balance their efforts to empower collective action among security officials while managing this principal-agent problem and undermining adverse collective action. The chapter "Fending Off Shield and Sword: How Strategic Purges of State Security Personnel Protect Dictators" focuses on the strategic use of purges by leaders to undermine adverse collective action among officials. I test the theory that leaders purge according to factional ties to undermine collective action on the case of the Stalinist purges of the Soviet secret police using individual-level career data. Extant conflicts and social cleavages often shape how states expand power to the periphery. The chapter “How Settlement and Inter-Ethnic Conflict Over Property Rights Shapes State Capacity” focuses on Japanese-led state-building in Manchuria. I examine the strategies that states utilize in expanding state capacity through exploiting ethnic conflicts and cleavages between its subjects, finding that conflict can induce cooperation with state-building efforts from some groups but not others, due to different incentives arising from conflicting property rights institutions. I also address the trade-offs between deploying coercion and building infrastructural power, such as the adverse effects of repression on the state’s ability to administer and obtain information about its population. To highlight this tradeoff, my dissertation chapter titled “How Repression Undermines Infrastructural Power” shows that repression by police forces retards their ability to ascertain accurate information about the population. This relationship is tested by analyzing the legacies of arbitrary Chinese repressions against Korean settlers in warlord-era Manchuria. There is a strong relationship between anti-Korean repression and lower state capacity in the subsequent period, and police literacy data suggests this is partly driven by the inability to recruit quality candidates.