Loyalty Signaling and Agent Compliance in Autocracies: Evidence from Mao's China

• In Event: How the State Deals with Opposition

Abstract

In authoritarian regimes, what explains the variation of the political agents' responsiveness to the autocrat's order during repression? In this paper, we propose a novel theory to understand the varying compliance of subordinates in carrying out coercive tasks. We argue that agents who are considered less trustworthy by the ruler due to certain personal cues – such as ethnic group, religious background, or tainted personal history – are more likely to display greater enthusiasm in carrying out repression. Compared to their peers, agents with these untrustworthy traits face the additional burden of credibly proving their loyalty to the leader in order to improve their trustworthiness. Excessive compliance to the ruler’s orders during repression, we argue, can serve as a costly signal to display their loyalty to the autocrat, which offers an opportunity to change the leader’s preexisting perception. To test our theory, we have compiled an original database from the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957-1959), one of the largest repression campaigns during Mao’s reign. Officials in charge of implementing the repression had two types of revolutionary backgrounds: some were former Red Army officers who fought during the Chinese Civil War, while others were underground party agents who performed clandestine tasks in Nationalist-controlled regions. Historical accounts show that Mao strongly distrusted the latter group because their past experience as clandestine agents was often unverifiable. We find that provinces governed by former underground partisans prosecuted a greater number of convicted “right-wingers” compared to those governed by former Red Army officers. On the individual level, those “right-wingers” convicted in the jurisdiction of former underground party agents were likely to receive harsher punishment compared to those convicted by former Red Army officers. Our research offers a novel theory to explain how trust impacts the compliance of agents in an authoritarian setting.

Authors

• Jingyuan Qian, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Yunpeng Bai, Yale University