Coercive Institutions and State Violence Under Authoritarianism

Why do we observe such widely differing patterns of repression and state violence under authoritarian rule? Despite a wave of recent interest in authoritarian politics, the origins, design and behavior of the coercive institutions that embody the state's monopoly on violence remain relatively unexamined. This project draws on new statistical and geographic data, elite interviews, and archival evidence from the U.S. and Asia to chronicle the origins and operation of the internal security apparatus in three Cold War anti-communist authoritarian regimes – Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea – and compares them to similar processes in Communist authoritarian regimes in North Korea and China. Its findings challenge dominant narratives about contentious politics and state-society conflict in Asia; offer an unprecedented view inside 'secret police' use of surveillance, coercion, and violence; and provide a new understanding of the institutional and social foundations of authoritarian power.I argue that autocrats face a fundamental tradeoff between designing their internal security apparatus to deal with a popular threat, or coup-proofing it to defend against elite rivals. Coup-proofing requires an internally fragmented security force drawn from narrow segments of society; managing popular unrest requires a unitary apparatus with broadly embedded, socially inclusive intelligence networks. Autocrats construct coercive institutions based on the dominant perceived threat when they come to power, but these organizational tradeoffs, exacerbated by institutional stickiness, blunt their ability to adapt as new threats arise. Organizational characteristics thus give rise to predictable patterns of state violence. A more fragmented, exclusive security apparatus – associated with a high initial threat from fellow elites – is likely to be more violent, both because it has stronger incentives to engage in violence and because it lacks the intelligence capacity to engage in discriminate, pre-emptive repression. In contrast to existing threat-based explanations of repression, I demonstrate that autocrats who are deeply concerned about popular threats use less violence rather than more, and do so because they mobilize organizations expressly designed for that purpose. In these organizations, intelligence becomes a substitute for violence, and citizens relinquish their privacy, but less often their lives.Governmen

Authoritarianism in the Living Room: Everyday Disciplines, Senses, and Morality in Taiwan’s Military Villages

With the nationalist government – Kuomintang (KMT) – retreating from mainland China in 1949, some 600,000 military personnel relocated to Taiwan. The military seized former Japanese colonial properties and built its own settlements, establishing temporary military dependents’ villages called juancun (眷村). When the prospect of counter-attacking the mainland vanished, the KMT had to face the reality of settling permanently in Taiwan. How, then, did the KMT’s authoritarian power enter the everyday lives of its own support group? In this article I will focus on the coercive elements of KMT authoritarianism, which permeated these military villages in Taiwan. I will look at the coercive mechanisms through the analytical lens of Foucauldian discipline. I argue that disciplinary techniques such as surveillance, disciplining of the body and the senses, as well as the creation of morality regimes played an important role in the cooptation of village residents into KMT authoritarianism by normalising and naturalising it

The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process - the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) - involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups' final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency's promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports - the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials - offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate - as understood by relevant research communities - to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu

The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process - the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) - involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups' final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency's promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports - the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials - offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate - as understood by relevant research communities - to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu